Subversions of Verisimilitude: Reading Narrative from Balzac to Sartre

SUBVERSIONS OF VER I S I MIL I TUDE

SUBVERSIONS OF VERISIMILITUDE R eading Narrat;lIe from Balz ac to Sartre

Lawrence R. chehr

Fo rdham University Press

New York

2009

Copyright C 2009 Fordham University Press All righ ts reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored. in a retrie\'al system, or transmi tted in any (onn or by any means- electronic.

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accuracy ofURLs for external or third-party Internet websi res referred to in this publication :lIld does not guaramee that any content on such websites is, or will remain , accllr.lte or appropriate. Li brary of Congress Cacaloging-il\-Publication Data Schehr, Lawrence R . Subversions of verisimilitude: reading narrative frO Il1 Balzac to Sartre / Lawrence R. Schchr.-lSt cd.

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Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-82)2-) I ) I-I (clolh : alk. paper) I . French fiction-19th cemury-History and criticism. 2. French fiction-20th cenrury- History and criticism. 3. Re:lliSIlI in li terature.

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For Michael A. Johnson and Denis M. Provencher in deepest friendship and with my gratitude.

Contents

Preface Jtit roducl;oll

ix 1

I.

Balzac: EnaUages and Twists

11

2.

Flaubert and Zola: Challenges to Verisimilitude

58

3·

Colette and Proust: Queering Modemisl1l

124

4·

Sartre's Bodies

169

Epilogue

198

Noles

201

Bibliography

23 1

Illdex

237

VII

Preface

In writing this book, I have benefited from the input, comments, and suggestions of many people. David F. Bell, Andrea Goulet, Armine K. Mortimer, and Franc Schuerewegen all read the entire manuscript and generously gave me recommendations and suggestions on every page. I owe each of them a great debt of gratitude. For their suggestions, invitations, and generosity, I also thank E´ric Bordas, Patrick M. Bray, Ve´ronique Cnockaert, Margaret C. Flinn, Evlyn Gould, Doris Y. Kadish, Marie-Pierre Le Hir, Maryline Lukacher, Jean-Philippe Mathy, Giuseppina Mecchia, Karen McPherson, Stamos Metzidakis, Dennis Minahen, Sylvain Montalbano, Catherine Nesci, Elizabeth Rechniewski, Todd Reeser, Alistair Rolls, Beryl Schlossmann, Naomi Segal, Lewis Seifert, Sonya Stephens, Susan Suleiman, Tim Unwin, Margaret Waller, Alexandra Wettlaufer, and Gayle Zachmann. Special thanks to my interlocutors en permanence: David F. Bell, Michael A. Johnson, James Mandrell, Denis Provencher, and Robert Harvey. Conversations with each of them have always provided food for thought. I am grateful for their support and wonderful friendship, as well as to Thomas C. Lay, Eric Newman, and especially Helen S. Tartar, all of whom helped turn my manuscript into a book. Some of this material has been published in earlier forms and I would like to thank the publishers and editors for permission to reuse the material in this book. These previous publications are: ‘‘Flaubert’s Failure.’’ In Cambridge Companion to Flaubert, edited by Timothy Unwin, 208–19. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Copyright 䉷 Cambridge University Press 2004. Reprinted with permission. ‘‘Deipnomachy, or Cooking with Zola.’’ Nineteenth-Century French Studies 34, no. 3–4 (2006), 338–54. ‘‘Proust et l’Unheimlich.’’ In Savoirs de Proust, edited by Michel Pierssens, Franc Schuerewegen, and Ana Gonza´lez Salvador, 143–62. Montre´al: Paragraphes 2005. ix

x Preface

‘‘Colette and Androcentrism.’’ In Entre Hommes: French and Francophone Masculinities in Culture and Theory, edited by Lewis Seifert and Todd Reiser, 158–78. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008. ‘‘Sartre’s Autodidacticism.’’ In Sartre’s Nausea: Text, Context, Intertext, edited by Alistair Rolls and Elizabeth Rechniewski, 31–51. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. ‘‘Sartre’s Body Parts.’’ Journal of Romance Studies 6, no. 1–2 (2006): 185–96.

SUBVERSIONS OF VER I S I MIL I TUDE

Introduction

Even a cursory glance at the MLA Bibliography online reveals an interesting pattern in the conjunction of the terms ‘‘verisimilitude,’’ ‘‘French,’’ and ‘‘realism.’’ As might be expected by any literary critic familiar with Erich Auerbach’s epoch-making Mimesis, when the first two terms are searched with an AND operator, most of the articles and book chapters that appear on the list are about pre-nineteenth-century texts. Verisimilitude has a long literary history that crosses time, borders, and genres, though its particularities were defined differently according to when and where it was applied. A search of ‘‘realism’’ and ‘‘French’’ leads to spectacularly different results, with almost six hundred entries, most of which, as might be imagined, engage works from 1830 onward toward the twenty-first century. So while a database search reveals the expected answers for the name of a literary movement, it does not mark the preeminent process associated with that movement, the process that we can briefly define as writing that creates a representation that looks like what many would consider the perceivable phenomena of the real and that sees the underlying causes of these phenomena as obeying the agreed-on scientific laws and cultural figures of a rational universe. We should not consider such a database anything more than a useful tool for doing research. After all, the researcher would look at the results of the first failed search and go immediately to the second one to get the desired results. And what is in the database is merely the electronically combined results of the keywords provided by authors and editors. The word ‘‘realism’’ is far more telling: it defines a time period, a canon, a power of textuality, and a set of authors that are subsumed under certain practices. The word ‘‘realism’’ has two interrelated meanings. The first and narrower one defines realism as a set of authors running roughly from Stendhal and Balzac through Flaubert and the naturalists, whose processes of writing could be seen as an extension of the processes initiated by the earlier writers. As Armine Mortimer has pointed out, the use of the word dates to 1856, with a 1

2 Introduction

journal published by Louis Edmond Duranty, called appropriately enough, Le Re´alisme.1 The term was popularized the following year, but today few of us read Jules Champfleury’s manifesto of realism Le Re´alisme, published in 1857, the same year as the book considered to be the pinnacle of realist practice, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Champfleury’s work allows us to define the problematic of realism at its origins. Champfleury states the problematic simply on the very first page. He was given a challenge by a ‘‘distinguished woman’’: ‘‘To look for the causes and means that give the appearance of reality to works of art.’’2 So from the very first, the narrow meaning of realism that will retrospectively form a school around Flaubert yields its place to a wider version that would fulfill the sense of the challenge on a regular basis. This is then not just verisimilar passages or mirror-like representations here and there in a work, but rather a consistent approach that, from one end of a narrative to another, be it textual or visual, paints a world that seems like the one we recognize for that time, locus, and specificity. Thus, the second, wider meaning of the word refers less to a literary school than to a praxis: the styles and representational tactics that run from Balzac, Stendhal, and Flaubert through a number of contemporary writers. Under this definition, realism is a kind of narrative that sees itself and is viewed by others as taking, insofar as possible, a verisimilar approach to the world it describes. The reader believes what s/he is reading to be very much like the real world depicted in the narrative, even when, bizarrely, as with an impossible novel like Flaubert’s Salammboˆ, that world can never be known independently of the narrative that constructs it. That possibility is essential, for even when the reader is reading a historical novel like Balzac’s Sur Catherine de Me´dicis or one that imagines a world, such as Salammboˆ, the reader suspends his or her disbelief to think ‘‘this could have happened.’’ And this relates to Champfleury’s concept that the realist text functions like a daguerreotype, a photograph without any tricks: The daguerreotype was not invented in the seventeenth century, and this invention was lacking for critics of the time, who would not have failed to accuse Challes, relative to his declaration, of using the daguerreotype to shape his thought. Today, insults are in vogue. If a writer seriously studies nature and tries to put as much of the Truth as possible in his work, he is compared to a daguerreotyper.3

Certainly the comparison at that time was a commonplace as well as an insult, because it seems to describe a violation of the aesthetic of the representation of things as better than they are. And Champfleury is trying to wrest

Introduction 3

this notion of the ‘‘true’’ from the mouths of the embellishers who were also the naysayers to the first version of realism, those who perhaps preferred the pretty to the true. At the same time, he is trying to raise the idea of the ‘‘true’’ as a worthwhile and attainable goal for authors, whom he is not asking to gild the lily or prettify things but to represent life and nature as they are. Simply put, realist descriptions describe recognizable objects, even if, for example, Charles Bovary’s cap [casquette] and the catoblepas for the same author’s Saint Antoine seem nothing short of far-fetched. Realist dialogues could have happened, although quite often, in the interest of communication, authors do not render the stammering, stuttering, and interruption of everyday conversation. We see La Pension Vauquer; we hear Charles Bovary’s mutterings on the first day of class; we smell the burnt onions that perfume Germinal; we taste the madeleine dunked in a cup of herbal tea; we touch Lulu’s body as she pleasures herself in Sartre’s ‘‘Intimite´.’’ The figure of the photograph, with its presence and punctum, is the accurate one here. Experimenting in the 1820s, Louis Daguerre and Joseph Nice´phone Nie´pce produced proto-photographs through a process that Nie´pce called heliography. Writing their images in the white light of presence, these two inventors engaged in creating permanent visual records that would bring things to light for the ages. To my mind, it is no coincidence that realism was born at the same moment. Writing Le Rouge et le noir, subtitled Chronique de 1830, from about 1827 through 1830, Stendhal produced what we might think of as the first realist novel. Balzac’s realist works came a bit later, as arguably, La Peau de chagrin does not fit the profile of what we understand to be realism, yet there is no mistaking the world view in Le Pe`re Goriot as being anything other than a realist one. I am not suggesting a cause and effect relationship here. Rather, there is a zeitgeist seen in an urge by various artists and inventors to record the present, perhaps as a means of understanding the historical process in general and the recent past of the Revolution in particular.4 Or, put another way, as Sandy Petrey argues, the recognition of the ability to understand the process of representation of the real goes along with what he rightly terms ‘‘the rise of realism.’’5 I would add that the understanding of the process of representation is common both to Stendhal in Le Rouge et le noir and to the founders of photography. The need to understand history as a general and a local phenomenon was in the air after the Revolution; and Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of history date from the same period (1830–31) as the birth of realism as praxis. Both in Le Rouge et le noir and La Chartreuse de Parme, Stendhal sought to understand the effects and affects of history, be they those

4 Introduction

of the passage of Napoleon or those engaged by city-states in Italy in a period during which many nation-states already existed. This zeitgeist then involves a need to record and preserve the surrounding phenomena of the real and its causes; this need continues long after the literary movement as such ceases to exist or has been so transformed as to be recognizably different from Balzac and Stendhal. So even in the revolution started by a return to first-person narrative some seventy years later, basically initiated by Gide in mainstream literature ` la at the turn of the twentieth century with L’Immoraliste and fulfilled by A recherche du temps perdu, realism maintains praxes by depicting what might be considered to be real not from an epic, objective point of view, but from a subjective position with which some can identify. Subjective realism looks quite different from the omniscience of the Balzacian narrator, but it is nonetheless verisimilar. Strangely, the return of the subject happens simultaneously with the birth of another visual art: cinema. Here again the figures are, I believe, coincidental, but the birth of cinema can be used as a metaphor for this return: the subjective novel is a recording of one individual’s experience, seen from his or her point of view. If, in early films, cameras did not move, the static position soon changed, whether through moving cameras, Eisenstein’s notion of montage, or even the birth of Everyman as the protagonist of films. Can we see Proust’s protagonist as a version of Charlie Chaplin’s ‘‘Little Tramp,’’ Buster Keaton’s hapless, strangely unemotional figure that earned him the sobriquet ‘‘The Great Stone Face,’’ or Harold Lloyd’s hapless antihero in Safety Last! (1923)? Perhaps not, but the figures have a shared subjectivity and a universalized unheroic status. So writers like Colette in the twenties or Sartre a few years later, whether employing the first or the third person, eschewed Balzacian omniscience in favor of a much more reduced narrative perspective. Their third-person narrators do not know everything and cannot always predict what their protagonists will say, think, or do. They are not writing from some position superior to their characters, but from one on the same level and one that is sympathetic to them. This process of limited knowledge creates ambiguities: we can never fully know who Che´ri is or what the Autodidact is thinking, yet in the process we identify with uncertainty and with the subjective or singular point of view. And various subjects gain from this destabilizing of narrative: where would Proust’s, Gide’s, Colette’s, or Sartre’s concept of the individual homosexual be, if that concept and creation were wedded to the implicit ideas of nineteenth-century universal progress narratives?

Introduction 5

This then, in a very general way, is the path and practice of realism, and we know that it is still being practiced by many today, even in its older Balzacian form: many best sellers rely on the omniscient narrator to tell their stories, as if that position were not a challengeable one, and this, in spite of over a century of challenges to its universalizing tendencies. These universalizing tendencies, as I have briefly suggested, write an epic narrative, but one with certain permissible centers and structures and other figures, necessarily more marginalized. Under the umbrella of omniscience, women were the second sex, whites were the first race, and homosexuals were marginalized perverts. Heteronormativity, phallocentrism, and white mythology, to use Derrida’s famous expression, were part and parcel of the great narratives of the nineteenth century, and many vestiges of those powerful ideologies and belief systems still remain. While it is arguable that the moves through this set of realist practices are seamless, it is not necessarily the case in any individual work. What I would like to argue here, in the set of readings that form this book, is precisely that: sometimes, not to say often, realist writers detour their works in significant ways for literary reasons and those detours move the works away from realist representation toward a mise-en-abyme of the literary or toward the literary for the sake of the literary. Realism works precisely because of these interruptions, breaks, and imperfections. The sense of ars gratia artis is certainly not pervasive, but there are important moments, passages, and movements in many, not to say all, canonical French realist works that show these signs. In taking this approach, I follow such important work as that of Armine Mortimer, who, in Writing Realism, focuses on works in which ‘‘the novelists have woven writing into the fabric of the story.’’6 In this volume, I am suggesting that authors use a variety of literary devices, all of which are obviously delivered in writing, but not necessarily as writing. These devices upset the apple cart of realism in favor of artifice and aesthetic. One way of conceiving of this disruption is precisely as a subversive challenge to the bourgeois, materialist ideology subtending realism, as well as a challenge to basic notions of the representability of the real. Our understanding of the real as real depends on the heliography already mentioned—a bringing to light of what is hidden—and this is accomplished through perception, insight, analysis, ratiocination, and method, all processes associated with realist fiction and not coincidentally, with detective fiction that takes clues, traces, and tracks and reconstitutes an event that had been invisible to all but its perpetrator. These analytical and logical processes are necessarily always incomplete and imperfect; in attempting to tell the

6 Introduction

whole story, the realist narrator is also telling the reader that the real cannot be fully told, no matter how thoroughly one tries to do so. No analytical tools will ever allow for a full telling of a tale. Some things resist. Added to this is, beyond a resistance to an all-consuming ideology, a resistance to the basic ideas of representation and narration. This is tantamount to making the statement that, within narration itself, narration can be impossible. Of course this is an inherent contradiction, but it is one that is fundamental to the understanding of what realism does and how it does what it does. In a nutshell: just as there is no position within Western metaphysics, ontotheology, or phallocentrism to put those overlapping systems into question, and no position, as Jacques Derrida has convincingly shown, outside them, there is no position within realist narrative from which to question realist narrative as a form. Any such questioning would force the system to crash. More importantly, the entire enterprise would be seen to be a colossal fiction, whereas what motivates it is precisely the notion that it is representational of something that looks like reality, something that is somehow not just fiction. Realist fiction purports to tell the truth about the world it describes. Fictional cities and towns in realist narratives may not actually exist in the real world, but when we suspend our disbelief, we believe that the characters in those cities and towns behave as others would have in real locations. Though this is not a unique case, the power of this fiction is so great that the town of Illiers was renamed Illiers-Combray in 1971. Arguably there are contemporary ways of making the system crash, but, I would argue, these become possible only when the possibility of an overarching grand narrative has faded and the omniscience and the ubiquity of an invisible narrator has been fully challenged. Before that, with the exception of tricks like using an unreliable narrator or the narrative feint used by Agatha Christie in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, it remains difficult, if not impossible, to push the limits of the realist project. Realism rises to its challenges, even when, as I have indicated, authors replace the omniscient thirdperson narrator with a limited first-person narrator. In both cases, the possibility of narrating the truth is never itself challenged. For example, one could argue that Marcel Proust’s repeated recourse to prolepses that deal with narration or the reader’s understanding of an event is symptomatic of this belief in the power of narrative to recount the truth: the reader may not understand now, but she or he will eventually come around to understanding the narrated event.

Introduction 7

So while a reconsideration of the relative subjectivity that is concealed at the origins of the realist enterprise is impossible precisely because that reconsideration would be perilous, each realist work contains points that come apart, implode, or otherwise challenge the enterprise by illustrating the tension between that need to represent and the need to be literary. Here, however, I do not want to return either to an older narratological model— though this work will make use of some aspects of narratology—or to a model that shows the realist mirror to be faulty or flawed, or even to one that shows it to be accurate. In a sense, I am distancing myself quite a bit from arguments about textuality as mimetic or anti-mimetic, the dangers of mimesis, or even the formal processes of representation such as those described by Ge´rard Genette or Gerald Prince. Thus, while questions of homodiegesis and heterodiegesis do interest me, they are not those on which I focus in this study. Before saying what it is I am doing in this project, it would be meet, for historical and methodological reasons, to state why I am not following a strict narratological model. Certainly narratology has brought many insights and understandings to the ways in which we read narrative literature; the work of Ge´rard Genette, Gerald Prince, Dorrit Cohn, and Jean-Marie Schaeffer, just to name four critics, is brilliant and revolutionary, offering excellent readings of micro- and macro-textual situations. Their work has been followed by that of Ross Chambers, to name another of the most stellar critics whose work subtly and thoroughly provides accounts of straightforward narrative events, discourses and counter-discourses, ludic discourses, and the like. I would not have been able to write this book had I not studied and deeply admired their work among others’. Yet, in a period from roughly 1966 to 1971, we see a sea change, initially offered as a critique of structuralism, in the work of Jacques Derrida, and while narratological critics continued to write after that moment, another strand of narrative theory began to develop. In his studies of Le´vi-Strauss and Rousseau among others, Derrida challenged some of critics’ most basic beliefs and axiomatic behaviors relative to presence and absence, to writing and speech, to center and periphery, and to a whole host of other entrenched dyads. As every reader of this work knows, Derrida’s influence on the fields of literary and cultural studies was immeasurable and the use and misuse to which his thought and his concepts of ‘‘deconstruction’’ have been put are countless. Yet the crucial text marked by this questioning illustrates, like no other, the symptomology of this veering away from structure

8 Introduction

and narratology, the questioning of premises, and the implicit models of realism, for it was a work about a somewhat marginalized, yet profoundly realist work. The critical work is, of course, Roland Barthes’ S/Z, published in 1970, and it is a study of Honore´ de Balzac’s then lesser-known work, ‘‘Sarrasine.’’ I do not intend, in this brief introduction, to recapitulate the many excellent readings of S/Z or to provide a new one of my own. Rather, I mean simply to state the obvious. The work seems to be well within the continuous tradition of structuralism, semiotics, and narratology. Barthes breaks up the story into hundreds of ‘‘lexies,’’ which he considers to be ‘‘unities of reading.’’7 A thoughtful analysis of the first three lexies provides him with what he considers to be the five basic codes of the text (this one or, arguably, any other): hermeneutic, semantic, symbolic, proairetic, and cultural.8 While an individual reader might choose to have a difference of opinion as to how to classify a lexie—and clearly, in a realist work, many lexies will have multiple classifications—the coding system, being a ‘‘scientific’’ approach, again lies firmly within mainstream semiotics. But Barthes quickly moves away from this classificatory system: he does not abandon it, but he supplements it with prose, with riffs, and with ambiguities. And ‘‘dangerous supplements’’ they are. This prose is the heart of the analysis, yet there is no coding for it within structuralism, semiotics, or narratology, which were hard and clean approaches to the material. Barthes’ approach in these paragraphs, much like Derrida’s early work, is fuzzy, ambiguous, and, in many ways, unexpected. It is the beginning of the end of the ‘‘scientific’’ approach and it introduces, within theory and reflecting theory’s object, that which cannot be so neatly defined. Thus in this book, I would like modestly to continue along some of those paths cleared by the two bad boys, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. This book is a discussion of some of the perverse paths taken in realism and specifically in canonical narratives steadfastly anchored in that tradition. The goal here is to analyze these texts, regardless of the narrative mode chosen, in order to see the deviations and detours from realism, mostly to aesthetic ends. In the first chapter, devoted to two lesser-known works by Balzac, as well as the now famous ‘‘Sarrasine,’’ all part of his Come´die humaine, I examine what appears at first to be a simple rhetorical device, the enallage of person (a substitution of one person for another—the royal ‘‘we,’’ for example), until we begin to understand that this device undercuts the creation of a stable identity for characters. Balzac’s realist need for a character to be himself or herself, because of the laws of verisimilitude, is countered by the figural play of language. One of these works, La Maison Nucingen, purports to

Introduction 9

be the success story of Euge`ne de Rastignac, the protagonist of Le Pe`re Goriot. But the author plays with both narration and plot devices and in the end, while he does explain Rastignac’s success, he spends far more time explaining the fictions and artifices of plot and narration. The final part of the chapter revisits certain aspects of the now-familiar ‘‘Sarrasine.’’ Chapter 2 addresses two interrelated issues: the concept of failure and the concept of misreading. Throughout his career, Flaubert chose to have his characters fail, often because of their limitations and ignorance rather than tragic flaws in their personalities. One need only think of Charles Bovary’s botched medical career (especially Hippolyte’s surgery), Emma’s indebtedness, or Bouvard and Pe´cuchet’s experiments gone wrong. Again, while Flaubert is expressing his own personal pessimism—and he of course has the right to do so—he is at loggerheads with a realist vision in which, arguably, some characters (people) do succeed, against all odds. The specific example, which might be considered a singular case of failure, is Emma Bovary’s singular capacity for misreading. Again, this is a very literal act, distinct from Harold Bloom’s rhetoric or map of misreading. Emma never quite gets it right (to a different end, Bouvard and Pe´cuchet misread as well), and specific forms of failure ensue. By inventing a scientific approach to his analyses, Zola might seemingly have avoided the same pitfalls as other authors before or since. Yet in a number of striking cases—the symphonie en blanc in Au Bonheur des dames, as well as Le Ventre de Paris and Germinal—the system implodes upon itself. In Le Ventre de Paris, Zola cannot help being a show-off as he demonstrates his talent as a writer, thereby forsaking realist accuracy of representation. In addition, in that volume, he shows how the supposedly correct transmission of information can go painfully wrong if the receptor does not share the same goals as the emitter. Knowledge can be dangerous for a realist text, yet the work cannot function without knowledge. In Germinal, we realize that the structures of a class-system tend to create hierarchies that do not always fit the traditional model when viewed from another position. This is nothing new in the age of the postcolonial, but Zola amply demonstrates that a differing perspective brings realist technique and realism’s position as a bourgeois phenomena into question. The third chapter stems from something of a paradigm shift, as it is devoted to the problematic of the representation of sexuality or the consequences of that representation in the work of the two most important authors of French high modernism, Colette and Proust. In this chapter, I

10 Introduction

show how Colette’s gynocentric writing, when reinverted into her masterpiece Che´ri, undoes the stability of the sign system so that representations and plot take on ambiguous meanings, especially insofar as questions of gender and sexuality are concerned. This is, without a doubt, a gender-bending novel before its time. Along similar lines, Proust needs no introduction, but here I show how an analysis of two other figures rewrite fictional prose. In the first case, it is a question of examining the moral or ethical position of the narrator as it relates to ‘‘Un Amour de Swann,’’ and as that section relates to others in the book. In the second case, it is another figure, that of astonishment, and this on the emotional level instead of a formal one, that rewrites the novel and turns it away from the direction in which it had been heading. At that point, Proust’s narrator stops being the figure of the reader in the text and officially dons the mantle of the writer with consequences for the familiar and the familial, as well as for matters of gender. Finally, I examine two works by Sartre, a short story entitled ‘‘Intimite´’’ that is part of the collection Le Mur, and Sartre’s most famous prose piece, La Nause´e. In both works, Sartre decenters the functions of realist representation from a position that is admittedly subjective, through a process of defamiliarization. In so doing, he creates strange positions for his characters and makes language itself, which had heretofore served as the handmaiden of realism, into a dubious vehicle for conveying the complexities of the early to mid–twentieth century. Sartre’s writing then, pointing toward 1939 as the war drums begin to sound, is a fitting closure to what we retrospectively see as that slightly displaced one hundred years of realism, from its beginning in 1830, an explanation for both modernity and history of realism’s end in the heretofore unseen horrors of the Second World War. Not only was there no poetry after Auschwitz, there was no realism either.

1.

Balzac: Enallages and Twists

Le Contrat de mariage: Enallages of Person In this chapter on Balzac, I would like to focus on two of the less studied works in La Come´die humaine: Le Contrat de Mariage, an 1835 novel that is an e´tude de mœurs included in the Sce`nes de la vie prive´e, and the very cynical 1837 work La Maison Nucingen, published the following year as another e´tude de mœurs, but part of the Sce`nes de la vie parisienne. I will conclude the chapter with a somewhat revisionist reading of ‘‘Sarrasine.’’ While there are clear reasons to revisit ‘‘Sarrasine,’’ it is perhaps not as clear why I am choosing these two other works, for I am not attempting to repeat the gesture by Barthes, nor am I arguing for a recentering of La Come´die humaine. Yet, there are compelling reasons for choosing these other two works, not the least of which is their relative marginalization in the criticism of the Balzacian canon. It is somewhat understandable that both of these novels have been somewhat neglected, for compared with the recognized masterpieces such as the Vautrin series, Euge´nie Grandet, or the two novels included in Les Parents pauvres, both works have a less far-ranging dynamic and complexity. It could easily be argued that these are both set pieces that involve a fairly simple location in which complicated, detailed conversations take place that themselves form the heart of two quite baroque, yet basically single-issue, plots. And yet these plots are fundamental figures and subjects of narrative. As its title suggests, Le Contrat de mariage revolves around a brokered marriage contract, including what we would today call a prenuptial agreement.1 Given this subject matter, the novel necessarily engages questions of family relations, civil status, the validity of writing, and the transmission des biens, all of which are so necessary to nineteenth-century French socioeconomic structures and perhaps even more essential to nineteenth-century French novels.2 Yet through the impositions of various sorts of figural language and tropes, including a series of complicated yet pointed metaphors and the use 11

12 Balzac: Enallages and Twists

of one specific figure of speech, the enallage of person, which will be discussed in detail below, Balzac puts the basic building blocks of realist narrative into question; a narrative dependent on heteronormativity plays out as a deconstruction of these elemental figures of the social and of narrative. In La Maison Nucingen, Balzac ostensibly sets out to explain the history of the success of the protagonist of Le Pe`re Goriot, Euge`ne de Rastignac, who, at the very famous end of that novel, challenges Paris itself: Rastignac will succeed or he will die trying. And succeed he does, so that later, in an encounter with Vautrin, now disguised as the Abbe´ Herrera, with whom he discusses the latter’s protege, Lucien de Rubempre´, Rastignac is a man of the world, a player in Parisian social and political circles. The work at hand is thus a bridge between the end of Le Pe`re Goriot and the rest of the Vautrin cycle, Illusions perdues and Splendeurs et mise`res des courtisanes. It is an instrument used to explain the change in status of one of Balzac’s most important characters, even if Rastignac will not be featured in the rest of the cycle as anything more than a secondary character. And this work ostensibly offers the necessary explanation, but doing so has a cost: Balzac develops such a complicated, arcane, and recondite plot that the reader may wind up focusing on the idea—the fiction—of plot itself instead of on the details of the success story. Balzac thus offers a mise-en-abyme of narrative’s basic mechanism, the change of state through action; this figure of narrative, according to Gerald Prince, is elemental, and it is one of the fundamental notions necessary to realist narrative in particular. In so doing, Balzac offers his readers the ‘‘bare bones’’ of what he is doing in his writing, including setting the scene of narration as action; the author implicitly asks his readers to think about whether or not narration and plot—as he exposes them—are themselves verisimilar. Balzac offers up for meditation some of the basic bonds and figures of the developing realist narrative aesthetic, one that purports to represent an actuality along with the underlying laws of production, relation, and meaning. Through an analysis of these figures laid bare, I shall show how Balzac makes detours in his narrative, or, more precisely, makes a move toward verisimilitude an impossibility because of the ways in which narrative works, fails, disrupts, teases, and seduces the narratee. At the same time, in ways specific to each narrative, the position of the narratee or that of the rhetorical reader is made ambiguous by the mechanisms used by the author to further the narrative, as the position of the narratee is totally destabilized by the narrative, and therefore, as the possibilities of decision relative to objectivity and subjectivity and thus, to verisimilitude, are removed.3 And in

Balzac: Enallages and Twists 13

‘‘Sarrasine,’’ we shall see how a fundamental trick necessary to the narrative turns it in perverse ways away from more standard narratives in La Come´die humaine, but also away from the five codes of S/Z. As I have just suggested, Le Contrat de mariage focuses on the preliminary measures taken before a marriage can be entered into. In specific, the novel focuses on a discussion of marriage in the abstract between two friends, the selection of a suitable fiance´e for Paul de Manerville, the hapless protagonist of the work, the negotiations between the two clerks who represent the interests of the prospective bride and groom, and finally, the unhappy, infelicitous, and ultimately failed marriage between the two lovebirds. Yet if we are to understand what is at stake here and decide in what ways Balzac detours his narrative, we should start with the basic unit of definition and determine what ‘‘marriage’’ may mean, so that we can understand what a marriage contract, a legal agreement between two or more parties, might be. We know, for example, that laws about primogeniture and inheritance were changing at the time that Balzac was writing, and Michael Lucey has shown how these changes had an effect on later works in the series such as Le Cousin Pons and La Cousine Bette.4 Yet if specific details relative to inheritance were changed at this point, the basic definition of marriage did not change and it is to that definition that I now turn. Until quite recently and for a very long time before that (with the understanding that marriage, like any other social institution, is a historical construct that necessarily knew variants), marriage in Western societies was generally defined as the union—be it religious, secular, or both—between a man and a woman. Certainly, there have been variations: just to name two, John Boswell has pointed to the possibilities of civil unions in the Middle Ages between members of the same sex, unions that were treated as marriages; and polygamy has been practiced by groups as different as Muslims and Mormons. More recently, same-sex marriage and civil unions such as the pacte civil de solidarite´ have come into existence or are about to exist in a number of countries in Europe, as well as in Canada, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and several places in the United States. And there are other versions of union: common-law marriage or ‘‘living together’’ in parts of the Englishspeaking world, l’union libre or concubinage in parts of the French-speaking world, and equivalents throughout the West. Still, even as we are witnessing a change in mores in the early twenty-first-century West, it is unchallengeable that the basic definition of marriage here is the heteronormative one I have mentioned, one certainly the norm during Balzac’s time: the legal union between one man and one woman, guaranteed by the state and

14 Balzac: Enallages and Twists

sometimes guaranteed as well by a religious institution that can either supplement the state or stand in for it. In Balzac’s work, this form of marriage is the most common, in spite of the fact that marriage is often depicted as an unfortunate institution in which the participants are obliged to suffer in silence or find their pleasure elsewhere. Given the author’s predilection for irony and cynicism, it stands to reason that many of the marriages he puts center-stage sour; equally important of course is the fundamental opposition in his work between the mariage de raison, so necessary for the reproduction of the nascent capitalist model, and the often ill-fated romantic marriage based on love, but doomed to fail because of the couple’s naivete´. That marriage is translated into a set of negative affects in no way changes the structures of the basic social bond or even the agreed-upon contract that is its legal translation; in many cases, the set of affects can be seen to reinforce the institution of marriage and all its attendant figures. Thus, for example, in La Maison Nucingen, we learn that the Baron de Nucingen is fully aware that his wife Delphine is having an affair with Rastignac and that, in fact, that relation serves to strengthen the social structure and social order in which the Nucingens move. Rastignac’s squiring of Delphine serves Nucingen’s plans as it allows the latter to be free to maneuver in financial matters unhampered by personal relations or social constraints. We already know that it is rare for there to be a happy marriage in Balzac’s work: the marriage between Nucingen and Delphine is, of course, a mariage de raison based on the fact that her father was once a very wealthy man who had provided a sizeable dowry, and it comes as no surprise to see this arrangement. But even from the start, matters go further. Well-versed readers of Balzac know from the beginning of Le Contrat de mariage that if there is to be a marriage in that work, it is highly doubtful that the marriage will be a happy, felicitous, and peaceful one or that the characters will live happily ever after. If we know that from the beginning, what we cannot and do not know is that Balzac will challenge the very definition of marriage through the application of a strange set of rhetorical devices and that the characters implied as participating in that marriage will necessarily be detoured from the positions that they otherwise would have occupied and that they were destined by the seeming trajectory of the plot to occupy. From the beginning of Le Contrat de mariage, in the discussion between Paul de Manerville and Henri de Marsay (who, the reader will remember, also participates in a perversion of the predicted relationship in ‘‘La Fille aux yeux d’or’’), the latter will attempt to persuade his friend not to marry, after

Balzac: Enallages and Twists 15

a speech in which the narrator sketches out a portrait of Manerville, one that paints him as being barely capable of having a happy marriage or of effectively running his household. For example, Paul has had a childhood in which money played a central role without being visible: ‘‘Without thinking that the greed of fathers prepares the wastefulness of children, [Paul’s father] gave almost nothing to his son, even though he was an only son.’’5 Marriage is an institution whose object is to guarantee the transmission des biens as well as the economic well-being of the offspring of the marriage; Monsieur de Manerville’s behavior, however, will lead to neither of those, if the narrator is to be believed. And that failed transmission will be repeated, with a twist, by Paul, for he has nothing really to give, except his idealized vision of romance that is doomed to fail. But that is only half the story, for Paul’s personality does not lend itself to marriage. On the one hand, there is the psychological portrait of a man who is somewhat weak-willed, one might say, hardly masculine, according to stereotypical criteria for masculinity: ‘‘Cowardly in his thoughts, daring in his actions, for a long time [Paul] maintained that secret candor that makes a man both the victim and the willing dupe of things against which certain souls hesitate to protest, as they prefer to suffer instead of complaining.’’6 To be a victim here is a way for Balzac to prepare the reader to see Paul in a comedy, for the word ‘‘comedy’’ is precisely that of the narrator who will speak of ‘‘the big comedy that precedes every marriage,’’7 as well as the larger picture of La Come´die humaine as a whole in which no drama ever reaches the noble, tragic stage. It is a comedy whose results will be anything but funny and will be quite dramatic in their consequences, for they will have a permanent effect on Paul’s married life, but they will not be deadly; the position of the observer or reader will be colored by Schadenfreude. Paul’s habit of reading novels8 is, again according to stereotypical criteria, coded more as feminine than as masculine, in spite of the epicene nature of the ‘‘white hand’’ (main blanche) of the rhetorical reader in Le Pe`re Goriot. And at least as far back as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, we know that reading novels is considered a feminine activity and a dangerous one at that, for it leads to absorption in the novel and a move away from a consciousness of self and who one is and who one is supposed to be. If, then, Paul’s father is the incarnation of a kind of virility that is a throwback to the eighteenth century, his tyranny has not produced a son as virile as he is, but rather a somewhat less than macho individual who is hardly prepared for the struggles of modern life as it is defined under the Restoration and especially for the institutions of modern marriage as they develop in the nineteenth

16 Balzac: Enallages and Twists

century. Nor would Paul be masculine enough to participate in another kind of marriage, practiced as often as not by members of high society: a marriage in which each spouse may have his or her own lover(s) and promotes the social ambitions of his or her spouse. Finally, because Balzac will almost invariably insist on an essential nature to gender (Vautrin remains steadfastly masculine in spite of his homosexuality); when there is in fact a disjunction between man and masculinity, when something improper takes hold of an individual, we know that the character in question will necessarily stray from the path he (in this case) should otherwise have followed. Balzac offers an anaphoric repetition of the word ‘‘mais’’ to describe a series of Paul’s characteristic behavior patterns: ‘‘But he had caused sadness to no woman, but he gambled without losing, but he was happy without any fuss, but he was too honest to cheat anyone, even a girl; but he didn’t leave his love letters lying around.’’9 Contrary to the typical pattern of Balzac’s bad boys who will make good (or who will have tragic endings), this pattern allows us to guess that Paul is a man, who, always playing honestly, does not have an innate capacity to cheat, to reason strategically, or to avenge a wrong. By following the rules of propriety, he condemns himself to losing the game; more to the point here, Balzac offers the contradictory proposition that the improper leads one to the proper conclusion and vice versa. And even if Paul will not arrive at success, his story will not end in tragedy either, but in sad, not to say pitiful, mediocrity. As he is a moral individual, Paul is weak and is prepared neither for the world of Bordeaux nor for the even more complicated world of Paris. In an early and famous scene in Le Pe`re Goriot, Rastignac essentially has the door to the Restauds’ household closed permanently behind him (at least for the duration of the novel and in the intervening years before his eventual success in 1836, according to La Maison Nucingen). If he does not then understand why this happens, he will eventually understand, thanks to his cousin, Madame de Beause´ant, and he will learn from his mistake. Yet, from the beginning to the end of Le Contrat de mariage, Paul de Manerville will learn no lesson and become no wiser as an individual, nor will he develop any insight into himself or others; not learning and remaining in ignorance are, in and of themselves, ways of not assuming the position for which one is destined by the organization of birth and society into which a character is socialized. When all is said and done, this is a novel of non-apprenticeship in which the protagonist is as uninformed at the end as he is at the beginning. The irony of the situation is reinforced by a change in style: we

Balzac: Enallages and Twists 17

move from a third-person narrative to the bare innocence or naivete´ of an epistolary novel. Now I have outlined the basic societal mechanisms at work in the novel and indicated that, given the way in which Balzac positions his protagonist, both socially and psychologically, the desirable conclusion that Paul might wish for himself is not going to happen. In so doing, I am not suggesting that the path followed by the plot of a novel should in fact be predictable; far from it. An argument in favor of verisimilitude in the novel would depend on the unforeseeable and the unpredictable; the contrary would lead the novel into the stereotypical instead of into the singular that is necessary for an original vision and representation of a set of conditions, individuals, and events. Granted, the extended anaphora begins to beg the question, as Balzac goes for a rhetorical solution to what is essentially a psychological portrait of a morally straight, very normal individual, whose lack of excess or even individuality would itself, if described in a straightforward fashion, probably descend into ennui instilled in the reader. But it is only when Balzac strays from a fairly simple stylistic, insistent figure with no inherent semantic implications—anaphora—to a series of complicated metaphors that have far-reaching semantic consequences, that the novel begins to wander from the verisimilar. When Henri de Marsay tries to discourage his friend from marrying, the reader may wonder whether he is thinking like the narrator or is standing in for the narrator in assuming that Manerville has little innate talent for assuming this role in society? But as the reader soon discovers, de Marsay goes much farther than the narrator could go in his comments as he offers a cynical critique of the institution of marriage as such. De Marsay becomes an unfettered, uncensored version of the narrator, one not bound by the constraints of Balzacian absolute, by the biense´ances, whatever form they may take, or by fealty to verisimilitude. De Marsay speaks thus: ‘‘But my dear friend, marriage is another matter altogether. I see you from here being led around by the nose by the Countess of Manerville.’’10 The moment is telling and critical, for in addition to being an overt critique of a sacrosanct institution that is the foundation of both the bourgeois state and the hoped-for continuation of the Restoration, this remark by Henri de Marsay is the first instance in the narrative of what I would call an evocation of an imaginary person, and this narrative will eventually be haunted by a slew of them. Quite simply, the Countess of Manerville does not exist, but, in order for the moral argument to have weight, she must exist. Logically, de Marsay is imagining that Paul will marry a woman who will rightly become the

18 Balzac: Enallages and Twists

Countess of Manerville, and yet, if we take him at his word, he is in a state of illogic: it is in fact literally impossible for him to imagine her specifically, whatever he says; he can conceive only of a type or of likely candidates, none of whom will actually become the Countess of Manerville. The person or character does not exist and the one who will eventually occupy this position is still unknown to him, even if the novel will shortly turn to presenting the character who will eventually occupy that role. For now, however, the imagination is impossible and verisimilitude has taken a walk. This conjunction of a critique of the institution of marriage with an imaginary character will form the basis of the argument of this part of the book. It would be easy to keep a reading of this work at the level of realist, verisimilar reading, be it social, economic, or simply stylistically verisimilar, as we follow the complicated vagaries of contract law and the functions of notaries—and here, as in the even less studied La Maison Nucingen, the details of the twists and turns of the plot tend to confuse, rather than enlighten, the reader. Yet I would suggest that it would be rather more profitable for an understanding of the text to destabilize a received sense of the verisimilar and focus on the ways in which language undercuts the characters and the institutions of marriage, and forces a detour where it could not have been expected. On the one hand, Balzac offers a biting critique of marriage, but not so much through a social, cultural, or institutional analysis as through a rhetorical, tropic destabilization of normative discourse. On the other hand, Balzac sabotages the institution of marriage and its attendant discourses by projecting the image of a population of imaginary characters whose phantasmatic ‘‘presence’’ haunts—in the Derridean sense—marriage as an institution and fully destabilizes it. In specific, this destabilization occurs through the repeated use of a specific rhetorical figure, the enallage of person. Generally speaking, an enallage is a figure of rhetoric in which one gender, number, mood, tense, or person is substituted for another, be it a grammatical or an ungrammatical substitution. In specific, an enallage of person is the substitution of one grammatical person for another. For example, within the French context, the first-person plural pronoun ‘‘nous’’ is substituted for the first-person singular pronoun ‘‘je’’ in academic conference talks. Listeners recognize the substitution and do not for a moment assume that the speaker has suddenly become schizophrenic. The same substitution can be seen in the royal ‘‘we,’’ most famously in Queen Victoria’s perhaps apocryphal remark, ‘‘We are not amused.’’ And again, the same figure pops up in the annals of hospital stays, in which the nurse stereotypically asks the patient, ‘‘How are we

Balzac: Enallages and Twists 19

feeling today?’’11 Enallages of person can simply be considered markers of a particular discourse, discursive field, or profession, and in that, they could be considered stylistically realistic, that is, verisimilar: notaries—for they are the prime movers behind the multiplication of enallages in Le Contrat de mariage—speak that way because of their function; it is thus that they represent their clients. In aiming at a verisimilar discourse, Balzac repeats the specific traits of their discourse. Yet, as enallages are rhetorical figures, these very same figures in a literary context, as Paul de Man showed repeatedly, tend to destabilize the text of the novel. And when one adds to these enallages the context in which it is a question, as we have already seen, of imaginary characters or persons, the very meaning of the word ‘‘personne’’ is both redoubled and contradictorily negated, for the word ‘‘personne’’ in French means both ‘‘a human being’’ and ‘‘the absence of a human being,’’ that is, ‘‘no one.’’ Yet before arriving at the multiplication of enallages, it is useful to continue to look at how Balzac destabilizes institutions and their representations through what Henry de Marsay says and specifically, the way in which he says it. Marriage destabilizes both the present and the near future because it is an institution that bets everything on the distant future and those who do not yet exist as well as what they will have: ‘‘Marriage, Paul, is the stupidest of social immolations; only our children profit from it, and they do not know what it is worth until their horses graze in the flowers born on our graves.’’12 Thus does marriage burn those who engage in it, and, I would add, at least from the misogynistic point of view often proffered in La Come´die humaine, more men than women, even if de Marsay does not say this directly. Marriage is a death sentence that is not always fulfilled; in all cases, it would seem that it is a condemnation to a permanent state of continuous degradation; the decomposition and the desacralization of an individual are the results of marriage. Marriage is made concrete only in a more or less distant future, not only after the death of the husband, but also after the children have attained the age of reason, after the father’s supposedly sacred tomb no longer counts for anything, when it will be nothing more than a place for horses to graze. Marriage counts only when it no longer exists, when one of the spouses is dead, and when the events and duration of the marriage are so forgotten that even the sacred and sacramental nature of the institution has been forgotten as well. Marriage is a funeral rite: the death of the husband is evoked as well as that of the wife who throws herself on the burning cadaver of her late husband; in celebrating suttee, marriage is not Christian. Seemingly a Christian rite, marriage has suddenly become Hindu.

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And, beyond that, as marriage happens in the future even as it is deconstructed by the future that is different from the one it predicts, there is not, nor can there be, any jouissance. And without jouissance—and I am totally serious here—it is impossible to make a baby (at least in those pre-postmodern times); without children to come, there is no future, there are no heirs to reach the age of reason to profit from what will have been inherited. Marriage then is an unlivable state of affairs that is neither celebration nor institution, neither present nor future, neither jouissance nor dissolution, whatever the social norms may state. Certainly marriage exists; I would not be so foolhardy as to deny a phenomenon that surrounds us every day. And it is not that the individual human being, Honore´ de Balzac, does not believe in the institution of marriage, but rather, that he allows Henry de Marsay to speak in a different voice from the proper one that must be maintained by the narrator: different from that of social norms and societal dictates. Balzac, the essentialist, ventriloquizing through de Marsay, can see no essence to marriage; for him, it seems merely a hollow phenomenon that serves no good end for a young man like Paul de Manerville. To reinforce the point, Balzac follows the equine metaphor with another animal image that reduces the man to nothing more than a beast of burden: ‘‘We alone are exempt from wearing packsaddles, and you want to be harnessed up with one? Why are you getting married? You need to account for your reasons to your best friend!’’13 This pack-saddle is fitted onto an animal to allow it to carry goods on its back or flanks, so once again, the implicit desire to transform oneself into a beast of burden and the equivalence offered between the two questions make marriage impossible, for a woman is not going to marry an animal. Yes, of course, this is a metaphor, but we are obligated to take Balzac literally, at least on one level. We are speaking of a civilized institution, one that is at the very heart of civilization, according to certain accepted definitions. And yet we are in a position in which basic definitions of that institution are denied, sent into aporetic tailspins, or negated. And beyond that, since marriage is also a performative institution, a speech act by which the event is effectuated through language, we must consider the rhetoric and we are obligated to analyze the language; it must be taken literally before any other cultural and institutional considerations. The same metaphor is continued in the development of another argument against marriage, one relying as well on another impossibility inherent in the rhetoric of the institution: ‘‘Married, you become an idiot [ganache], you calculate dowries, you speak of public and religious morality, you find

Balzac: Enallages and Twists 21

young people immoral and dangerous; in the end, you will become a social academician.’’14 If it is obvious that ‘‘ganache’’ means, among other things, an incapable and rather unintelligent person, a word that recalls semantically the expression ‘‘un vrai cheval de baˆt,’’ it is still necessary to consider the animal implications of the signifier of the metaphor, for the word literally means the back part of the lower jaw of a horse. Balzac continues his complicated animal, indeed bestial, metaphor and in so doing, he makes Paul other than who he is: the list of things that, according to de Marsay, he will do will denature him and make him what he is not. But we have already seen that this transformation into another—into the other—is part and parcel of this hallucinatory vision of marriage, and this vision occurs way beyond the common notion that marriage, at least for men, is not a natural state. What follows this complex metaphor does not pursue this exact line of argument, but a parallel one, although de Marsay’s goal is obviously the same as before. When he says ‘‘you calculate dowries,’’ he announces the entire plot of the work that will follow. But this also means that once married, Paul will become someone like the two notaries or like Madame E´vange´lista. In the first case, a simple petty bourgeois clerk would not be the ideal or even the appropriate husband for the future Countess de Manerville; in the other case, it would be a marriage between two women. It is, to be sure, a fantasy, and moreover, this would not simply be between two women but between a mother and her daughter, a violation, to say the least, of several societal taboos. De Marsay does not yet know who Paul’s wife will be and we are certainly at a point in the plot well before Paul will choose Natalie. Yet it behooves us to note that the author is already calculating dowries and foresees the plot as it will develop. If becoming a ‘‘social academician’’ is not necessarily a position appropriate for a bachelor from Paul’s class background, it nevertheless remains a position whose mobility is limited in society. And, in going on, de Marsay says nothing less than that: ‘‘But marriage, Paul is a social dead end.’’15 If the future immanent for someone like Paul—who should eventually be a peer of France—is social success (like Rastignac’s, to offer only the most wellknown example in La Come´die humaine), getting married is completely the reverse. Paul would not be himself if he got married, and if he were to get married, it would mean not only a failure to assume his proper social role but also the condemnation of his marriage to fail. By using this language in particular, de Marsay aims to make a joke, but by its wording, the phrase acquires the force of some eleventh commandment of the Bible. It is an

22 Balzac: Enallages and Twists

injunction with a divine weight that is, at the same time, an injunction or an imprecation against marriage, in spite of the heteronormative marriages invoked in at least two of the other commandments (implicitly in the fifth and explicitly in the tenth). The discussion changes and de Marsay finally accepts that Paul will eventually marry, despite his arguments against the institution and all the negative results that marriage will have; he may have convinced the analytical mind of his rhetorical reader that something untoward is going on but he has not convinced his interlocutor. Here as well, things are not as clear as they might otherwise seem and the argument is a bit perverted by the language used by the devil’s advocate: ‘‘Then, at forty, during your first gout attack, marry a widow of thirty-six: you could be happy. If you take a young girl as your wife, you will die rabid!’’16 The pain of the woman’s loss of virginity is twice displaced in these two sentences, first by the gout attack and then by the bite that would provoke rabies. It is not the woman who will lose her virginity, for, as a widow from her previous marriage, that will ostensibly already have happened. This having been said, we can never be sure about paternity and thus, questions of inheritance for the eventual offspring are always up for discussion. Doubt prevails and the institution is once again in jeopardy. This doubt must in turn make the reader wonder about the rabid death foretold by de Marsay. If Paul marries young, and to a young woman, he will die from a the bite of a rabid dog that we can assume, somehow, is that young woman. Thus this death is put in parallel with the death evoked in the preceding sentence. It could just be thought that the widow lost her husband after an attack by a rabid dog as well. Thus, it is only his death that allowed her, perversely and ironically, to become a peaceful woman. Is this hysteria? Perhaps. But in any case, the scenario, according to de Marsay is a far from graceful one. A woman is a rabid dog who will kill her husband, and it is only through his death, the sacrifice of a propitiatory victim, that she will become a real woman, just as earlier the marriage is validated only when children pass over the grave of their dead father. Again, an interspecies marriage is hardly a marriage according to the rules of the game. Still, on the phantasmatic level, it is even more complicated, for this second marriage, the one with a real woman, depends on the ‘‘marriage’’ of the assets brought to the new marriage. Hers were those of her late husband, and thus, in this case, the second marriage is a marriage with a couple, a woman who was an animal and a dead man. Once again, marriage as it is represented by

Balzac: Enallages and Twists 23

de Marsay to his friend is a falsification or at least a perversion of the institution of marriage as it is commonly understood in daily parlance in civil society. For Balzac, or at least for the point of view he is expressing through de Marsay, marriage is not as simple as love or even as the passing on of worldly goods through an established order. All of de Marsay’s remarks point us toward that complex position in which marriage is what it is not. Both the knowledge and the art of love are still not governed by civil legislation, that is, by a language other than their own: love, be it proper or improper, has a language proper to it. In love, the couple can remain two, yet with marriage, a third is always there and is present in the form of juridical language. The state is there; it is the third that always accompanies the couple to the bower and on the walk through life thereafter. Yet de Marsay will go even further in his argument against the institution, a bit of sophistry that continues to denature the object of study: ‘‘Do you believe that marriage is like love and that, for a husband, it is sufficient to be a man to be loved?’’17 One might say that, in addition to being a husband, it is necessary for a man to be a diplomat, a policeman, a lawyer, and even a notary, whereas what is really needed is a lover. That is certainly the simpler interpretation of de Marsay’s question. Yet one might surmise as well that it is necessary for the man to be a woman as well, for this would be the logical variant of the three-way marriage just discussed in which there were two men and one woman. Here, there are two women and a man: the man-woman and the woman he marries. Mirror images of one another, these phantasmatic marriages would seem to be the same occulted figures of homosexuality seen in Le Pe`re Goriot or in La Fille aux yeux d’or. The possibility cannot be excluded. Brought together with the other examples born of this teratological discourse, this perversion of marriage seems no stranger than any of the others and totally consonant with them. One final image of marriage in de Marsay’s discourse leaves us little hope for a marriage that resembles either the idealized image of marriage or the standard definition of marriage in daily discourse: ‘‘You who wants to get married and who will marry: have you ever thought about civil law? . . . Civil law, dear friend, put women under guardianship, considered her as a minor, as a child. How does one govern children? Through fear.’’18 Once again, marriage creates or fosters not only inequality between the two spouses, but a taboo as well. This time, it is the state that provokes the situation by infantilizing the wife, a process through which she becomes a minor, someone who is incapable of being legally married. Just as the historical and

24 Balzac: Enallages and Twists

social institution of marriage creates problems for the man and especially for innocent victims with personalities like Paul’s, the state renders the situation even worse, by transforming the woman into a child, and then into the plural, ‘‘children.’’ Once again, Balzac’s discourse provokes a relation other than a marital one, this time parental, yet between spouses, it is also excluded by the norms of heteronormative marriage. It should be clear that Paul will have learned nothing from this conversation with his friend, and the comments that follow from the narrator promise no happy future for him, in spite of his desire: ‘‘He was one of those men made for receiving happiness more than for giving it, men who get much from the feminine, men who wish to be guessed and encouraged, for whom conjugal love must have something providential.’’19 There will be no providence for Paul and readers will have to wait just a short while longer in order to know what form his destiny will take and what the incarnation of the suffering of this elegant man will look like, this man nicknamed ‘‘Beau Brummel’’ (fleur des pois).20 Still, he does not yet know, and he will thus blithely and innocently continue to think that his happiness is possible: ‘‘Marriage, he told himself, is disagreeable only for the little people; for the rich, half its troubles disappear.’’21 It is only when the phantasmagoria that de Marsay has evoked becomes fully real in the form of a bicephalous monster who is unthinkable, unspeakable, and unprintable, that matters will be driven home, but this will occur far too late in Paul’s realization for him to undo the position into which he has cast himself. Let us turn then to reality: the woman, the future wife, the femme fatale is embodied in the form of Natalie; there is no longer any need to speculate about the identity of the Countess of Manerville, for she is finally presented here in flesh and blood. Balzac, often coy or cagey, does not make any attempt not to show his hand here. We quickly understand that it is not a question of Natalie but of Natalie and her mother, Madame E´vange´lista; Paul’s fate is from now on always already doubled in that teratological twinning of mother and daughter. His fate is in their hands, for it is impossible to separate them, and, as any reader might guess, Paul will be obliged to marry both of them; so from the outset of the real encounter, the plot is doubled at a phantasmatic level with a fantastic, impossible image of a threeway marriage or a marriage between a man and a bicephalous monster. With the character of Madame E´vange´lista, who, in contrast to the etymology of her name, is anything but the bearer of good tidings, Balzac raises the stakes even higher as there is a confusion of paths that both realize the individual

Balzac: Enallages and Twists 25

as a singular subject and make that realization or that individuality an impossibility. Let us consider the description of the character of Madame E´vange´lista: ‘‘Creole, and like women served by slaves, Mme E´vange´lista, who was a member of the Casa-Re´al family, the illustrious family of the Spanish monarchy, lived like a ‘grande dame’ and ignored the value of money.’’22 So it is not merely a question of a noble family, but of a royal family: in addition to being part of the family of the Spanish monarchy, Madame E´vange´lista seems to have a name that fits, for ‘‘Casa-Re´al’’ means ‘‘Royal House.’’ How then to explain her creole background? A morganatic marriage in the more or less recent past is certainly possible, but not at all certain. What is also possible is that Balzac wants to offer an origin that is something other than European in order to insist on the relentless motivation of the mother for her daughter, for the Spanish royal blood alone would not have sufficed. Thus, just as we have thought her name appropriate to her, Balzac introduces an ambiguity that does not allow readers to decide which way to interpret the tale of this woman who will prove to be the driving force in establishing a marriage contract that vastly favors her daughter and disfavors and ultimately ruins her future son-in-law. The siren who will lure Paul de Manerville to a fate worse than death, that is, to this hellish vision of a monstrous marriage, will take shape in the form of Natalie, who ‘‘knew nothing of existence’’ and, worse yet, ‘‘ignored the price of things’’ and ‘‘did not know how revenue came in or was maintained and kept.’’23 First, it would seem that Natalie is undecipherable: ‘‘Like all young people, Natalie had an impenetrable face.’’24 To say the least, this is a strange remark from the pen of an author who will spend his life reading signs on the faces or bodies of his characters such as Grandet’s well-known ‘‘basilisk’s eye’’ or Lucien de Rubempre´’s famous womanly hips. But, through a somewhat sadistic image, not so much a figure of speech as a disfigurement, the narrator quickly gives the lie to what has just been stated: ‘‘Nevertheless, a man skillful in wielding a scalpel would have discovered in Natalie some hints of the difficulties her personality would offer when she was taken with conjugal or social life.’’25 To understand Natalie and to know how she will behave in the future, it is necessary to disfigure and deform her, a perversion, if ever there were one, of the conjugal idyll. Once again, for the marriage to work, the nature of the marriage itself and that of at least one of the individuals involved in it have to be slashed and rendered monstrous. For there to be a marriage, Natalie has to become something less than a woman: ‘‘But to make such an unmalleable woman

26 Balzac: Enallages and Twists

flexible, the iron fist de Marsay spoke about to Paul was necessary. The Parisian dandy was right. Fear, inspired by love, is an infallible instrument to marry a woman’s mind.’’26 In a novel that will revolve around money and its eventual absence or presence, the situation in which the three characters find themselves seems to promise nothing positive. We are dealing with an elegant man who, according to his friend, is not yet moral enough—that is, immoral enough—to get married and someone who is far too easily swayed by emotions that are not severe enough for him to maintain the necessary backbone and fiber to be a husband in modern society. We are dealing with a castrating mother/mother-in-law and a supposedly innocent young woman who will eventually become the double of her mother; Natalie is therefore someone who is a monster in the making. As Gise`le Se´ginger puts it to describe both of them: ‘‘Natalie is her mother’s arm. The latter, from afar, pulls the strings of a story as if she were Vautrin in a dress.’’27 Up to this point in the novel, every time marriage has come up in the discussion between characters, we have noticed that Balzac explicitly relies on vocabulary and examples destined to pervert or disfigure it, much as Natalie has just been figuratively disfigured by a surgeon’s scalpel that is the equivalent to the narrator’s powers of observation and description. We have also asserted that this marriage will be among three people, as Balzac himself will say much later: ‘‘In this second battle, Paul’s future had completely changed without his knowledge. Of the two people he was marrying, the more talented had become his enemy and thought about how to separate her interests from his own.’’28 So, from the twist in the plot in which the preparation of a marriage contract turns into a series of skirmishes, the proposed marriage becomes an unholy and illegitimate affair, at least in the eyes of the law, that is a contract among three parties who cannot legally be married to one another since both bigamy and incest are illegal under the laws of France. Even if Madame E´vange´lista were to die, she would haunt the future of her daughter just as the old Count of Manerville has deformed the present of his son Paul; yet she does not die and her presence is integrally related to the perversion of the figure of marriage. While Paul is haunted by his father, the latter is not a player in the game; Madame E´vange´lista remains a figure with whom to be reckoned, one who deforms and distracts from any possibly harmonious future. And we must state that the cause of what Balzac calls ‘‘the first skirmish of that long, tiring war called marriage’’29 was precisely the fact that Madame E´vange´lista did not make any distinction, did not separate her daughter’s assets from her own, and thus got mixed up with her.

Balzac: Enallages and Twists 27

So we read that ‘‘this widow owed her daughter one third of the fortune left by Monsieur E´vange´lista, twelve thousand francs, and found herself incapable of paying it, even by getting rid of everything she owned [tous ses biens].’’30 Given that the state defines the citizen relative to his or her ‘‘biens,’’ this confusion, which we could rightly qualify as appropriation or theft and which is a classic Balzacian usurpation and grab for power, will be of prime importance to future development in the novel: if one’s possessions are not distinguished from those of another, it is highly possible that one’s identity is not clearly defined either and even that it has been stolen. It is not simply the category of the majorat that complicates matters but any implicit contractual confusion.31 As the French say, never two without three, ‘‘jamais deux sans trois.’’ But it is not as simple as this mediated position in which Madame E´vange´lista is made, through both metonymy and the synecdoche, to represent all power and mediation, be it parental, in which she is the figure of herself and the metonym of the Count of Manerville, or official, in which she is the metonym of the state’s juridical discourses—as contradictory as they may be—on marriage and inheritance. For as soon as it becomes a question of opening up this marriage in a real sense, as opposed to the potential sense offered by the wise and cynical de Marsay, the perversities multiply out of hand. And they do so through the repeated use of the enallages of person already mentioned. Let us proceed directly to this rhetorical device, used for comic effect, yet with far-reaching, dramatic results. It is Solonet, the women’s notary, who speaks: ‘‘We are the daughter. . . . We are getting married with our rights according to the rule of the community.’’32 As I have indicated, on the surface, there is nothing strange here. Solonet speaks for Natalie, who cannot speak for herself in a situation in which a contract must be negotiated. The use of the word ‘‘nous’’ gives a performativity to the contractual persona of Natalie, one that neither ‘‘elle’’ nor ‘‘je’’ would be able to effectuate; this is thus the legitimate and ‘‘grammatical’’ use of the figure of the enallage, as rhetoric is marshaled to a legal end. At the same time, it is necessary to understand quite literally what Solonet says, for in saying what he is saying, he is changing sexes, multiplying himself, and substituting himself for Natalie or aligning himself with her. While this is obviously occurring at a rhetorical level that leads to the phantasmatic, it is not at all excluded from the realm of the literary. And in so doing, he is forming another three-way marriage, heterosexual and homosexual at once, a marriage that answers or corresponds, point by point, to

28 Balzac: Enallages and Twists

the conjugal perversions already imagined metaphorically by Henri de Marsay. But Solonet does not stand alone, for Paul’s notary, the elderly Mathias, matches Solonet enallage for enallage, at least in the rhetorical arena: ‘‘Our dowry [dot], said Mathias, is the property of Lanstrac.’’33 Mathias is speaking of the assets that Paul will bring to the marriage, yet, according to Le Tre´sor de la langue franc¸aise, it is only by metonymic extension that the word ‘‘dot’’ relates to the potential husband in a marriage; the first meaning of the word remains the assets of the bride-to-be. Once again, had the text not already put into place a phantasmatic mechanism peopled with and haunted by all sorts of creatures, one could easily let the metonymy slide. But because of the rhetorical insistence, it is not at all unthinkable that in speaking in this way, Mathias is in fact creating a situation in which marriages multiply—is it a marriage among three, four, or five?—for both notaries and Madame E´vange´lista seem to be implicated at this point. Or has Paul been transformed into another blushing bride with land as his or her dowry? Who is marrying whom? Is Paul, man or woman, marrying Natalie, her mother, the two notaries—be they men or women?—or several of these? The basic civil status of every individual involved in this negotiation is put into question as the rhetoric of the novel becomes ever more complex and imbricated, intertwined, and interwoven; the physiology of marriage, to use another Balzac title, has become ever more complicated by an increasingly perverse sexology transformed by rhetoric. Whereas Henri de Marsay had to invoke complicated metaphors deploying a semantics of bestiality, the narrator needs merely, in an economy of language, to let the characters do what they naturally do—let the notaries speak as notaries—in order to denature the contract and relations represented in the novel. The relation becomes ever more complicated because of the confusion between Madame E´vange´lista’s possessions and those of her daughter, and the consequent confusion between their civil identities. The representation of the individuals, their possessions, and their civil status is equally confused, for it should not be forgotten that Solonet also represents Madame E´vange´lista. As he starts to speak for her, he adds yet another difficulty to the performance of gender and person in the novel: ‘‘This is why, continued Solonet. We did not do an inventory after the death of our husband; we were Spanish, Creole, and we did not know French law.’’34 There is a rather transparent irony in Solonet saying that he was not aware of French laws, since it is not clear that in using this enallage he necessarily abandons his own identity; were he to do so, he could not exercise his position as a notary

Balzac: Enallages and Twists 29

and his enallage would have no consequence; he is in a rhetorical double bind. Here, with great brio as well as a great deal of tongue-in-cheek humor, Balzac multiplies the possible paths by combining the maternal entry into marriage with the mother’s double nationality, but it is a nationality that is more than double, for the word ‘‘cre´ole’’ has three interrelated but not identical meanings: someone of European origin born in the colonies (arguably the most likely category for Madame E´vange´lista), someone of African origin born in the colonies, and someone of mixed race. Mixing races, sexes, and origins, Balzac puts into doubt the very possibility of performing or defining marriage without ambiguity. If the remainder of these conversations are embroidery on the same figure, there is one final moment that is an intensification of the consequences of this enallage for verisimilitude. Here it is a question of a dialogue between the two notaries in which the enallages of persons, both living and dead, transform the dialogue into something that is hysterically funny, totally surreal, and completely confused: [Mathias]: Did we eat the lost millions, we who seek only to resolve the difficulties of which we are innocent? —Marry us and don’t quibble, said Solonet. —Quibble! Quibble! You call quibbling the defense of children’s rights, as well as those of the father and mother? —Yes, Paul said to his mother-in-law, as he continued.35

Yet if Paul can continue, the reader does not necessarily have to go any further. The marriage condemned for Paul by his friend de Marsay has been recondemned by negotiation, but more accurately, by the rhetorical processes of language. To say the least, the marriage bed will be a crowded one. When Mathias thinks that ‘‘they are going to make him kiss the switches before whipping him,’’36 he means, of course, as the Tre´sor indicates, that they are going to ‘‘make him recognize the justified nature of a punishment.’’ Yet it must be said after all these diversions, perversions, and multiplications, there is another possible interpretation. Let us quote Balzac one final time, as he perversely puts an Italian phrase into the mouth of a Spanish character, thereby blurring matters even more: —Questa coda non e` di questo gatto (this tale is not from this cat), exclaimed Mme E´vange´lista in looking at her godfather Solonet and pointing Mathias out to him. —There is something fishy here, whispered Solonet to her, answering her Italian proverb with a French one.37

30 Balzac: Enallages and Twists

In passing, I should remark that Balzac quotes the Italian proverb again later.38 With all the sex changes, with all the me´nages a` 3, 4, 5 . . . , with a marriage contract rendered both baroque and useless by the number of players involved, are we at all astonished that Balzac’s language, with its ‘‘switch’’ (verge) also being slang for the male member, and his eel, in the fishy French original, nothing less than a phallic symbol? This should astonish no one. We are all used to the zoophilia, polygamy, and polyandry with which Balzac constructed his teratological marriage. Castrating and castrated in turn, all the characters in this novel are broken by discourse, by performativity, and by diabolical enallages of person.

La Maison Nucingen: Twisted Plots and Plot Twists Among the seemingly essential elements of narrative, two stand out as fundamental in any common-sense approach to understanding how it works: character and plot. Prose is not essential to narrative, as any reader of the Western canon knows. There seems, however, to be an absolute need for characters or at least minimally for some coalescence of a figure around a monological voice or discourse, however whole, fragmentary, or even contradictory it may be. So if many of Dostoevsky’s characters seem strangely subject to Bakhtin’s sense of the dialogical, if Benjy’s narrative in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury seems to be fraught with the impossibility of a logical unfolding, and if Samuel Beckett’s L’Innommable or his Comment c’est do not seem to have characters in the traditional sense, there still is an identifiable locus (or loci) of discursive production that is focused on something like a character. Canonic narratives tend to have several main characters and a whole host of secondary ones, especially narratives of verisimilitude from the mid-eighteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries. Moreover, outside of family sagas and some well-known examples like Wuthering Heights and Middlemarch (which bends the format in a number of ways), most protagonists live through most of the narrative. Similarly, a plot is essential, and as I have already noted, it is the defining element of narrative: for there to be narrative, there must be change over time. This change does not have to be an action as such; it can just as easily be the inscription of a change of subjectivity, whether it is the opening sequence in Oblomov or the final sequence in Ulysses. Narratives that inscribe that outward stasis turn the factor of change inward onto the subject(s) of discourse: who records his, her, its, or their changes becomes the discourse of the narrative. Canonic narratives in the period in question tend to show

Balzac: Enallages and Twists 31

inner change as a result of actions or events, rather than leaving the reader to understand the changes directly through a character’s subjective ‘‘confession,’’ but there are, of course, exceptions too numerous to mention. At first glance, Balzac’s singular narrative, La Maison Nucingen, seems to fulfill the basics of classical, canonic narrative. It purports to be the story of how Euge`ne de Rastignac has risen in Parisian society to become a player and part of the elite. As such, La Maison Nucingen seems a necessary bridge between the earlier novel and the later narratives of Lucien de Rubempre´ (Illusions perdues and especially Splendeurs et mise`res des courtisanes), who meets Rastignac when the latter is already lionized by le beau monde. And yet, La Maison Nucingen is singularly incapable of fulfilling these functions, precisely because Balzac sets out to pervert normal ways of narrating. On the one hand, for a variety of reasons that will be explained below, Rastignac is anything but a protagonist in this narrative that is purportedly about him. In fact, there is no protagonist in the narrative save perhaps the performative voice of Bixiou, the intradiegetic narrator of Rastignac’s success, whose tour de force is recounted by an extradiegetic narrator in the next room. Bixiou’s voice gives a bravura performance in narration. In fact, this narrator seems to characterize the modern: ‘‘Opinions and form: everything is there, aside from literary conditions. But that’s what it was: a hodgepodge of sinister things painted by our time, to which one should tell only similar stories, and besides, I leave that responsibility to the main narrator.’’39 From the very beginning of the frame narrative, it would seem that the literary—whatever that is—has given up its place to a narrative that somehow paints pictures instead of using literary language. On the other hand, while we would expect nothing less than an intriguing and somewhat complicated plot from Balzac, the details of the plot in La Maison Nucingen are so numerous and the plot itself so swarming with minutiae that the reader cannot see the forest for the trees. This is not to say that the vagaries of the plot are contradictory, changed by rhetoric, or confused. A patient reader can tease out all the details of this very arcane plot that depends on shadowy financial moves, spurious actions, and rather cheesy individuals, and Armine Kotin Mortimer, for one, has done an excellent narratological plot analysis of this work, in which she underlines the digressive and chiasmatic nature of the plot development.40 Yet because of the high quantity of the minutiae, the reader must slow down to a snail’s pace if he or she wishes to focus on ‘‘what happens’’; in that case, it is difficult to see how the fundamental Balzacian trope of irony can take hold within the elements of the plot. These are not details that matter, in the way

32 Balzac: Enallages and Twists

in which Naomi Schor brilliantly elucidates the function of detail in realist narrative;41 they are rather the equivalent of the endless droning of an insurance salesman intent on selling his client—or the reader—a supplementary policy. Nevertheless, for all its divergences from standard realist form, La Maison Nucingen is a brilliant narrative that, through a gesture that essentially dismisses both character and plot, shows the ways in which narrative is (de)constructed. Though not a ‘‘how-to’’ manual for writing a realist narrative, it remains a key to understanding some of the processes at work in La Come´die humaine. In particular, Balzac undoes our received knowledge of narrative structures in order to show his readers the processes at work whereby fundamental figures including the invention of plot, the development of characters, and the story-telling process itself are constructed. It would be difficult to find a novel or a novella within the work of canonic authors whose plot has less interest for readers than La Maison Nucingen. The complex weaving of some half dozen narrative threads in the space of about sixty-three pages in the Ple´iade edition, threads that are by and large variants of one another, has, as its stated goal, to explain how the impoverished Rastignac of 1819 (the era of Le Pe`re Goriot) or even 1827 has become a rich man by 1836.42 Having married his sisters off well and having at some point finished his relationship with Delphine de Nucingen, Rastignac is ready to marry a rich heiress and assure his future in the social and political spheres. By any means—‘‘Quibiscum viis’’—as Balzac puts it in Illusions perdues, indeed.43 Through the narrative mechanisms described below, Balzac weaves a long story about one Godefroid de Beaudenord who eventually marries Isaure d’Aldrigger; neither is particularly a person of great qualities, and in an œuvre in which the author takes great pleasures in the representations of idiolects, one of the finest compliments that Balzac can have his narrator bestow upon Godefroid is that he has no regional accent but speaks ‘‘purely and correctly.’’44 In other words, in a strange way, this character is not even worth the time of the omniscient Balzacian narrator found in other narratives—but significantly absent here—and even less that of the author himself, who, in order to fill the plot of the work, spends page after page telling a story without any intrinsic interest. And the other narrative threads are even less interesting and are given even shorter shrift. When they are all combined in order to make Rastignac’s fortune, we have all, I would wager, lost interest in the plot. And the interpellated listeners themselves do not see how these threads, even when gathered—‘‘Rastignac held the strings of all

Balzac: Enallages and Twists 33

these people’s lives in his hands’’—could possibly lead to a telos: as Couture says to Bixiou, ‘‘I do not see, in all these spinning tops you are throwing out, anything that resembles the origin of Rastignac’s fortune.’’45 At least the postmodern readers among us remain fascinated by its inflicted ennui, in a sort of masochistic, self-directed Schadenfreude, even when the rhetorical listeners and readers cannot be. This lack of interest or of producing interest is, I think, the direct reason that such little critical study has been done of this work, with most monographs on Balzac passing over it in favor of more scintillating, scabrous, or ironic tales, in which the characters have intrinsic interest and the plots have ironic twists. In such narratives, the combinations of plots and characters show the inner workings of this society that the author would return to a previous time, at all costs, which he knows, from the very outset, is not about to happen. And it little matters that in its multiple, fragmentary, and intertwined plots, this narrative seems really to reflect the so-called real world, where everyone is a secondary character in someone else’s narrative and where change over time is never simple, but subject to complex laws of interaction. Still, this Wiederspiegelung cannot save La Maison Nucingen from inspiring yawns in the reader remaining on the surface of the narrative; a professor who assigned this work to an undergraduate class might be considered a candidate for psychoanalysis or at least early retirement. The interest is elsewhere, at a far deeper level, a far more fragmentary and inconsistent one at that. I would not for a moment argue that La Maison Nucingen is as great a work as those commonly agreed on as being at the apogee of Balzacian production; in no way does it attain the heights of canonic narratives from La Come´die humaine. At the same time, its marginality and its willful self-mutilation in depriving itself of a plot or characters that might retain the readers’ interest are figures that will eventually help us map the inner workings of the mechanisms of Balzacian narration. In order to do so, I will proceed along three ever-deepening levels: that of the story and of sjuzet and fabula together, for the distinction here is not particularly of interest. In that, La Maison Nucingen again is very different in its use of temporality and description in narrative from works in which that difference is a capital one for the epistemology and hermeneutics of the narrative. For example, the function of the flashback in Le Pe`re Goriot or that of ekphrasis in any of a number of brooding provincial narratives (such as Euge´nie Grandet) is illuminating. In such works, Balzac takes great pains to set the specifics of the scene and atmosphere through pregnant descriptions and narratives of past events, social structures, and the like. On the contrary, an analysis of

34 Balzac: Enallages and Twists

this story shows that there is no need for all that, and in fact that the laws of this universe can be reduced, despite all vagaries and variants, to a rather crude model that Balzac usually takes great pains to hide, out of politeness and out of concern for the sensibilities of his readers. Second, I shall demonstrate how the evisceration of the plot contributes, out of a kind of otherwise impossible narrative purity, to an understanding of how formal figures of the narrative are posited, in spite of character and plot; this will be based on the classical model of narrative developed by the Russian formalists and Roman Jakobson. I am not making a pitch for a return to the narratology of the 1960s and 1970s; rather, I want to analyze how some of our formal definitions taken as received knowledge are enacted in this work that is, in many ways, the Ur-anatomy of Balzacian narrative. Finally, I shall look at various aspects of the workings of narrative in what can only be described as a deconstructive move to discover the diffe´rance of the narrative. Were we back in the age of structuralism and narratology, I would describe this as the examination of the narrateme, subsequently to be undone by a deconstructive strategy. Again, without really invoking that vocabulary, what I propose to argue is the ways in which the motor of narration functions in light of the impropriety at the heart of the narrative. In Le Pe`re Goriot, Vautrin proposed a diabolical pact with Rastignac, whereby the latter would marry Victorine de Taillefer, the junior Taillefer would be killed, and Rastignac would find himself with six million; we know that this does not come to pass. Euge`ne does not accept the pact and even though Taillefer is killed, Euge`ne and Victorine most certainly do not live happily ever after. Vautrin is arrested and, after the ironic funeral of Goriot, Rastignac stands alone at Pe`re Lachaise, sees all of Paris lying before him, and challenges society: ‘‘And as his first challenge to Society, Rastignac went to dine at Madame de Nucingen’s.’’46 No one is there to witness his behavior, though we assume that he will show up for dinner at Delphine’s just as soon as the book is over. This reference is picked up in La Maison Nucingen, as Bixiou purportedly tells the story of Rastignac’s success and tells where the idea for Rastignac’s vengeance and success started: ‘‘This knowledge was attained in the wink of an eye: he got it atop Pe`re Lachaise, the day he led a poor honest man there, the father of his Delphine, a dupe of society. . . . He resolved to play everyone, and to do so dressed in a suit of virtue, honesty, and good manners.’’47 Any reader must wonder how Bixiou knows this. Readers will remember that there were no hidden microphones that day at Pe`re Lachaise; no bystander had a camera in his or her cell phone;

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Jimmy Stewart’s character of L. B. Jefferies was not looking through binoculars out his rear window. Rastignac was quite alone at the cemetery and, moreover, the idea of a ‘‘challenge’’ is known only to Rastignac himself and the omniscient and ubiquitous Balzacian narrator who is, I remind the reader, singularly absent from La Maison Nucingen. Did Bixiou have a private conversation with the Balzacian narrator of Le Pe`re Goriot? Or, as time has passed and as he is in the real world in which narratives are published as novels, did Bixiou quite simply sit down one night and read the novel? These are hardly likely scenarios. Alternately, has Rastignac confessed his innermost thoughts? This most plausible choice is rejected out of hand in the very first bit of the overheard dialogue that will segue into the narrative told by Bixiou, a dialogue that starts in medias res, but whose import and consequences could not be clearer: —And Rastignac refused you? Blondet said to Finot. —Absolutely. —Did you threaten him with going to the newspapers, asked Bixiou. —He started to laugh, Finot answered. —Rastignac is the direct heir of late de Marsay. He will make his way in politics as he does in the world, said Blondet. —But how did he make his fortune? asked Couture.48

So Rastignac hardly seems to be the source of his own success story; the same narrative dilemma occurs later when Bixiou recounts a private conversation between Rastignac and Godefroid.49 Clearly, it is Bixiou’s job to know, quibiscum viis. And perhaps the mystery of the origin of that narrative is simply consonant with Balzac’s mystery about the ways in which he typically allows his narrator to be omniscient. As such, Bixiou would be the figure of a kind of displaced mise-en-abyme of the narrative process of other works in La Come´die humaine. And yet he is not in this position for this narrative, one in which many of the tried and true processes of realist narrative are stretched thin. I shall soon return to the narrative aporias of this tale, but before doing so, as La Maison Nucingen is a relatively little-known text, even to Balzacians, I should briefly summarize the salient points of the plot (despite its lack of interest) before outlining what I think is the problematic here in which I believe all the interest lies. Grosso modo, Nucingen has used Rastignac as a means to keep Delphine happy and to allow her to fulfill her role in Nucingen’s universe, which is that of a trophy wife, without having to resort to unpleasant conjugal obligations; she is already a mother, so nothing more is needed. For Nucingen,

36 Balzac: Enallages and Twists

a wife such as Delphine is a sign—a representation—of his own status: ‘‘Nucingen doesn’t shrink from saying that his wife is the representation of his wealth, an indispensable but secondary thing.’’50 Delphine is a thing: she has been an instrument or a vessel for appropriate reproduction, but now, at least from her husband’s point of view, she is little, if anything, more than one of his many possessions. So to keep her happy and out of his hair, he allows her to have a lover who can deal both with whatever inner needs she may have—the nineteenth century is ambivalent about what proper bourgeois and upper-class women might desire—and with most worldly social obligations outside of ‘‘la maison Nucingen.’’ Thus does Rastignac squire Delphine around town and serve as her escort for society, and thereby leave Nucingen free to make profitable business deals. It little matters to Nucingen that Rastignac and Delphine are having an affair, for it is less that Rastignac is cuckolding Nucingen than that Nucingen is tacitly pimping his own wife to a john, Rastignac, who serves as an unwitting pawn in Nucingen’s pyramid scheme: ‘‘Nucingen’s thing [propre] is to make use of the most talented people without telling them.’’51 What is ‘‘proper’’ to Nucingen—a key word in this tale—is precisely what is improper to the fluid, verisimilar functioning of narrative. Two remarks here. First, if the collapse of the Law system was financial, we see that Balzac is theorizing a more general mode of financial fraud based on a kind of parasitism described at length by Michel Serres in Le Parasite.52 Specifically, Balzac is theorizing a pyramid scheme built on the backs of innocent investors. I do not use that term lightly, for Balzac already saw the game: ‘‘Nucingen let Tillet know about the pyramidal and successful idea of setting up a company with stock by amassing enough capital that could be used at first to meet the great interests of the stock-holders.’’53 This is an old game, one that runs from the scheme that Law used, in which he sold more shares in the Mississippi colony than he had money to back,54 through the fiction of Mel Brooks’s The Producers, the real collapse of Enron, and the 2008 economic debacle. This kind of financial fraud can be described as a pyramid scheme or a shell game. But more generally, since Balzac spares no effort in creating his work in all its nudity, it begs for a rough popular language that necessarily floats around literal and figural conceptions of who is doing what to whom. And that concept of ‘‘screwing,’’ which plays such a literal role in so many parts of this plot will take on full figurative value as the work progresses. Now, before turning to the second part of the plot, we recognize that even from the beginning, Balzac is investing in this narrative as a means of

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discussing narrative qua narrative, and the variety of its figures. Although Balzac does not develop the matter very much, this system is perceived as an oriental one by Blondet and Bixiou; in response to the former’s comment that ‘‘Every superior man must share the opinions of the East about women.’’55 Bixiou replies: ‘‘The baron collapsed Eastern and Western doctrines in a charming Parisian doctrine.’’56 Now, on the primary level, there is a double movement here. First, and most obviously, in distinction to the movement toward an equality between the sexes envisioned in the West, even if not yet fully attained two centuries later, the East, at least as it is habitually and stereotypically understood in and by the West, maintains a rigid and absolute hierarchy of the sexes in which the male necessarily, essentially, and completely dominates the female.57 Second, this fantasy of total masculine domination finds its way into numerous corners of La Come´die humaine,58 one of which is visible in the description of Beaudenord later in the tale: ‘‘In the end, he resolved to focus his feelings, his ideas, and his affection on one woman, a woman! The woman [phamme]. Oh!’’59 Yet this breach of the oral and the written leads us to the deeper consideration, for how can our intrepid, invisible narrator hear this difference in spelling? Even if the ‘‘a’’ of ‘‘phamme’’ would have been pronounced as an a poste´rieur, there is no justification for the ‘‘ph.’’ Our narrator can hear and make the distinction if he is translating emotion into a written text, but he can also hear it if the woman is always already a representation, as is the case for Nucingen’s view of Delphine. As a collection of movable signifiers, the woman can be modified as representation by the manipulator, be it the strong man or the invisible narrator. If the woman is a representation of the power of the man, the man has the power to coordinate that representation to mean what he will. The second part of the plot focuses in part on the improbably named Godefroid de Beaudenord, who, after several years of wandering, mediocrity, and loss of fortune seeks to marry. This Beaudenord, while ‘‘not too handsome a man,’’60 was at least not plug-ugly, and without visible defects. But it is certainly the first part of his name that is more than appropriate here, for he is not much more than the cold dildo on which the less than fetching mademoiselle Isaure d’Aldrigger will impale herself after marriage, thinking herself lucky, while the sneaky Baron de Nucingen continues to screw all of them. And finally, at least insofar as the plot is concerned, with at least five other parallel subplots involving a large number of ‘‘dupes’’ (pigeons),61 Nucingen builds his pyramid scheme. As the coup de graˆce approaches, Rastignac tells some of the potential victims of the scheme, notably Godefroid, about the game at hand; the latter takes his toys home,

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but he does not warn the others about what is happening. Through some shenanigans of creative bookkeeping, profit-skimming, debt reorganization, and profiteering, not to mention parasitism, Nucingen hits it big time and Rastignac comes out quite well in his pay-off for his participation in the fraud. Before arriving at one of the central mechanisms in this novella, which is the author’s tour de force on the sense of the ‘‘improper,’’ I should like to turn to the dispositif narratif, one that stands out as a told tale even among the various works in which such a device occurs.62 The extradiegetic narrator, who is not Bixiou, but someone who overhears his conversation with his friends, is sitting with an unnamed and unnameable other, ostensibly a woman (but this is not completely certain) in a private dining room, separated from the adjoining private dining room by a thin cloison. As Amossy and Rosen correctly note, this kind of room is used to favor ‘‘elegant meetings of those who . . . need to maintain strict anonymity,’’63 and thus the extradiegetic frame adds a note of additional and ironic spice to a story in which Rastignac and Delphine are anything but discreet. Theoretically without access to the standard Balzacian universals—and this, despite Bixiou’s own ability to transcend limitations—the narrator, be he willing or unwilling, will ultimately be more of a stenographer or a scribe: ‘‘We heard one of those terrible improvisations [that] my memory took down in shorthand.’’64 Balzac is already underlining for the astute reader the fact that the plot does not matter here and what is of importance is the question of form. As the first couple is eating their roast course, four young men enter— Balzac calls them ‘‘cormorants’’ in the first of a number of avian references65 —including Bixiou. These references are telling. First, in describing Godefroid’s need for ‘‘a woman,’’ whoever she may be, Balzac writes that he is following the example of ‘‘young men clucking in the hallways of the Opera like chickens in their cages.’’66 Again, there is another avian reference a propos of Godefroid, who, after his marriage, ‘‘found himself in charge of a young woman as stupid as a goose, unable to deal with misfortune, for at the end of six months, he noticed that the beloved had become a bird.’’67 Birds, brainless figures, clucking and squawking, such are the players in the human comedy Balzac is presenting to his readers in this work. Despite its seeming success story for Rastignac, this is one of the blackest tales in the entire Come´die humaine. Balzac challenges the basic premises of story-telling and of narrative form and, within the narrative, dismisses character and plot as mere threads to follow, or filaments with which the astute author can tie

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up his reader sitting in his or her armchair or with which the same author, en diabolique, can truss his naive reader before roasting him or her. In one way or another, the four young men are all social pique-assiette or e´cornifleurs, parasites on society who use words rather than acts; they are thus set in opposition to Nucingen and Rastignac in that respect. Balzac is suggesting not so much the Hobbesian turn of homo homini lupus, but rather the more ironic and more modern, homo homini cormorantis: I am your cormorant just as you are mine. I get you your fish but cannot eat it and somehow you will do the same for me. But in any case, once again, we have been derailed from the true and narrow and into a fable inspired as much by Aesop and La Fontaine as by the irony of Diderot, the games of Marivaux,68 or the cynicism of Richardson.69 The four eat quickly, in a dinner that includes macaroni,70 in a not so subtle reference, given the subject matter, to Goriot’s early career as a profiteering vermicellier. And they soon catch up to the first couple at the dessert course. Thus the four young men must have wolfed down their food—homo homini lupus after all—in order to talk, just as the first couple must have lingered—what were they doing?—in order to listen to, to overhear what had to come; again, in Michel Serres’s term, this is parasitic behavior. As Ruth Amossy and Elisheva Rosen point out, this is a banquet—a symposium in the Platonistic sense—and as such, it calls for a logos sympotikos, which is ‘‘strangely founded on the principles of slander, secrets, and scandal.’’71 In a sense then, this is a palinodic feast of words, a kind of antiSymposium that is fitting for a Hobbesian, pessimistic view of the world. Thus the narrator-stenographer knows that there will have to be a story: he wants a story just as the reader wants a story. He waits, biding his time, as he knows or at least expects that the story will come. And despite the numerous threads and intricate details, Bixiou can repeat every detail of the story and the auditory voyeuristic narrator can inscribe every detail with the same exactness. Is Balzac setting up a local narrative model that is the palinode to the good narrative model he would wish to have, in which characters, plot, and interest are all in balance, a situation that depends on a captatio benevolentiae, a state that is totally impossible here? I would like to think that this is the case and that Balzac is working out the demon of detail. Not even Ursule Miroue¨t, so well studied by David Bell, with its collateral relations, approaches the baroque plot of this much shorter narrative.72 There is thus a double disjunction. First, there is a disjunction between the perfect narrative system and the imperfect world it recounts. Balzac’s human narrator, who seems anything but human, given the fact that he is a

40 Balzac: Enallages and Twists

tape recorder, anything but human except in his desire to hear a story, to wait for narrative, to want to know, anything but human in his dallying while waiting, is an imperfect version of the third-person, omniscient narrator. Yet in this version, he is without measure: he does not know how to use detail, he does not develop metonymy, and he does not know how to use flashbacks, even if he paints a compelling picture. Perfect listener and perfect scribe, he is able to see what no one can see: ‘‘His pantomine and gestures, related to the frequent changes of voice through which Bixiou painted the actors on stage, had to be perfect, as his three listeners let out exclamations of approval and interjections of pleasure.’’73 And yet he cannot weigh, judge, or decide. Second, the perfect narrator is able to rise above the imperfect recounting by the other. If Bixiou is able to tell the myriad details of Nucingen’s coup and Rastignac’s change of fortune, his voice is set in polyphonic counterpoint, in the Bakhtinian sense, to the voices of the three other cormorants. It is notable that two of the three, Blondet and Couture, are marked in the feminine in one way or another. Blondet is a journalist who is described by our heteronormative narrator in the next room as one of ‘‘those men-girls’’ (ces hommes-filles),74 and Couture is named for women’s work. Let us pause for a moment to consider this, for we are finally beginning to approach the improper, which we can provisionally define (only to revise it later) as that which does not occupy the place it should and as that which challenges the place it should occupy. Couture: sewing is the work of women, chattering, gossiping in a beehive as they sew, and telling tales out of school with no authority to do so. Blondet: a journalist whose living depends on repeating and inscribing ragots and les potins du village. The two cobble, as they suture things together, creating a patchwork on the surface that is far from seamless; they produce a heterogeneity qua heterogeneity: they are ready to write countertexts or produce counterdiscourses at the drop of a hat: one might think of Lucien de Rubempre´’s experiences as a journalist in Paris, as he writes ode and palinode. They produce a heterogeneity that is governed by no universal law. The macho narrator has to take these feminine, incomplete, partial, and missing threads of tales and produce a homogeneity or a synthesis with a comprehensive law that sees structure and sense. The fact that the unnamed narrator cannot quite do it is beside the point: we see what must be done, and he, like da Vinci’s St. John, points the way. Structure and meaning must be subjected not only to the universal, but also to a law of completion that

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can explain both heterogeneity and the improper, while giving rise to the profound irony that is the mark of Balzacian creation. Why does Balzac focus on the improper? It is the word that comes back over a few pages in a marvelously funny set piece, inserted a bit serendipitously in Bixiou’s narrative about Godefroid. Bixiou offers the improper— always given in English and therefore in italics—as the British way of resolving matters. It is a way of making a clean surgical cut in order to decide what one may or may not do. The improper governs all behavior, both public and private, especially as it relates to the relations between the sexes between whom there must always be the most pure and irreproachable respectability. Thus, the bed of a bachelor such as Godefroid must be narrow, with barely room for one person: ‘‘a bed so narrow that he barely fit. Had an Englishwoman entered his room by accident, she would have found nothing improper.’’75 Yet, with his classic irony, Balzac is begging the question, to say the least: why on earth would an Englishwoman enter a bachelor’s apartment? In so doing, would she not be committing an improper act that violates the rules of propriety as established by the English system? Certainly, but the answer does not lie there, for, as we remember, the woman is the representation of something else, either of femininity and its dangers, as is the case, most clearly, in La Fille aux yeux d’or. Or she is the representation of the male system of power, in which case, having no intrinsic identity herself, no propre, she cannot be improper. In either case, if the man, identical to himself, can commit the sin of impropriety, she cannot. From the very first example, then, we are reassured, so to speak, that Delphine is doing nothing improper in going out on the town with Euge`ne. Through Bixiou, Balzac continues to offer examples of impropriety a` l’anglaise, whether it is a question of acknowledging a woman in the street with whom one has danced the previous evening at a ball or asking a woman whom one does not know to dance at a ball. Referring to Stendhal, Balzac mentions a British lord ‘‘who, even when alone, would not dare cross his legs in front of the fireplace, out of fear of being improper.’’76 Now all this would be quite funny—and it is—if it were merely a comedy of manners. And on that level, it works, enabling the author to create situations that provide reading and misreading, as well as propriety and impropriety, something he had done as far back as Le Pe`re Goriot, with Euge`ne’s consignment to the status of persona non grata after his disastrous visit to the Restauds. The improper is the law of Victorianism before the fact, a fairly protestant and puritanical approach to mores, that sees everything in black and white and excludes most things. But the improper cannot work in France

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and cannot work for this narrative in particular, whose details depend doubly on the improper. On the one hand, parasitism and adultery, both signs of the improper outre-Manche, are the topoi of the narrative. Success does not depend on the proper respect for the holy bonds of matrimony. Nor does it depend on the escape mechanism of prostitution or, more generally, on extramarital affairs with someone outside the system. This will be a safeguard mechanism proposed mid-century by the fathers of public health such as Auguste Morel and Alexandre Parent-Duchaˆtelet. No, success depends on the improper within the proper: screw someone and be screwed by someone within the totalizing system. Not quite endogamy, but not complete exogamy either. But who screws whom? It is not the reciprocal act that the French with their eternal literary verve call recto-verso and that le monde anglo-saxon, with its lack thereof, calls far more prosaically, flip-fucking. It is rather a baise en couronne, with only the final screwer, top dog, alpha male, exempt from receiving the gode froid.77 So it is the lack of being screwed in this world that allows one to be the possessor of the phallus. The reader may well be wondering whether I am willfully confusing social events and narration. I am, precisely because the text asks, even begs me to. It insists that as a master reader, I master it even better than the narrator has. Structurally speaking, then, there are three functions in the text: actor, narrator, and reader, and it is time to look at them in detail. For each of the functions, there is a limited figure and a transcendental one. For the actor, the limited figures are Rastignac and, in a subaltern position, all the minor characters such as Godefroid et tutti quanti. And we have seen that they do not matter. Balzac creates an amusing mise-en-abyme of the roman-feuilleton, as Bixiou recounts, ‘‘Blondet, one day they wanted me to perform; I told them a story from nine o’clock. to midnight, a veritable maze. I had reached my twenty-ninth character.’’78 For Balzac, the subaltern actors in this novel do not really count. In one case, he does not even bother to stabilize a character’s name: ‘‘His groom was a little Irish guy named Paddy, Joby, Toby (as you will).’’79 In another case, bored with the intricate details, he has Bixiou summarize the whole overdone plot with an ‘‘etc.’’80 For Balzac, in a true narrative that is not an inverted palinode, the actors must be like those in a Greek drama, few in number. Here, one might think of Le Pe`re Goriot in which even in the collective scenes the secondary characters serve as a chorus. In most rich Balzacian narratives, there is basically

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one line of plot, relentlessly pushing forward, with the remaining nonprotagonists in a polyphonic chorus. The transcendental actor here is Nucingen, just as it is Vautrin elsewhere and eventually Herrera, who will become chief of the secret police. I shall return to this below. The limited or rhetorical reader in the text is the partial, barely visible receptor. Here that reader is the invisible companion of the unnamed narrator in the dining room that adjoins the one in which Bixiou is holding forth. Elsewhere, again at the beginning of Le Pe`re Goriot, that reader is found in the famous remark about a person holding a book in a white hand—a hand not dirtied by manual labor. Spotless, unmarked, the rhetorical reader is he or she who can receive and be absorbed by a text without being screwed by it. And it is of course we, readers of Balzac, who occupy that transcendental position. Finally, the narrator is less Bixiou, one voice among many, than the anonymous stenographer. One could convincingly argue that the plot of La Maison Nucingen is not ‘‘how Rastignac gets rich’’ but ‘‘how to tell a story’’ or, better yet, ‘‘how not to tell a story.’’ Once again, the narrator is the one who transcribes without getting screwed. The transcendental figure is the Balzacian narrator we all know, the one who has Gyges’ ring or a magic walking stick, as Delphine Gay de Girardin would have it. But perhaps I am proceeding too quickly. If this structure is correct, if it is a structure of reception with or without being screwed, then the Balzacian narrator is the structural equivalent of an ex-Jew and a pe´de´, figures of material and epistemological superiority and alterity, and not of transcendental truth. And that is in fact the case. La Maison Nucingen tells the truth that the eventual avant-propos will not be able to tell: how to read a text in which a vermicellier becomes wealthy, in which an ex-Jew with a funny accent becomes a player, in which someone who is cheated by a stammering Jew learns to stammer and succeed in turn, and in which a gay criminal becomes head of the secret police. The Balzacian narrator is the possessor of the phallus, whereas everyone else, men and women alike, has only a gode froid with which to make their way to the top of the transcendental pyramid scheme that is otherwise known as La Come´die humaine. As indicated above, the concept of the improper would be funny if it were only an effect or a part of a comedy of manners. But the concept of the improper has a deeper figurality as a metanarrative comment, which leads to some final comments about La Maison Nucingen. Heretofore, I have examined the implications of the figures of the text for the narrative’s formal qualities, but now, I would like to turn to the implications for the concept

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of representation itself, before concluding with a discussion of the possible implications for narrative and the Balzacian narrator in La Come´die humaine as a whole. In a seeming paroxysm in the passage on the improper, the narrator reaches the ne plus ultra of tautology, contradiction, and impossibility: ‘‘You get worked up, you discuss, you laugh, you expand your heart, soul, and mind in your conversation; you express feelings; you gamble when you are gambling; you chat while you are chatting, and you eat while eating: Improper! Improper! Improper!’’81 Balzac has engaged with matters of identity and transcendental truth from the very beginning, referencing Kant as the chanter of the truth and its implications for the world. Mention is made, for example of Critique de la raison pure,82 but Kant’s truth and his research for the absolute are of another world—think of the E´tudes philosophiques such as La Recherche de l’Absolu, ‘‘Le chef d’œuvre inconnu,’’ or even ‘‘Sarrasine.’’ In each of those works, at the level of plot, the protagonist searches for an absolute ideal that is ultimately shown to be unattainable, and the protagonist fails fatally. Kant’s truth, like Balzac’s throne and altar in the ‘‘Pre´face,’’ is absolute, but is of another time and another world. Here however, we are in a world where everything is improper, for everything is representation, and meaning slides away just as it does in Diderot’s Le Neveu de Rameau, in which, as Balzac describes it, ‘‘the word did not respect the same point that the thinker was still discussing.’’83 Meaning slides away in representation and all falls into the improper, not an improper of morals, but an improper of being and especially, for Balzac, of narrative. Thus, in the previously quoted passage, even the Aristotelian figure of identity, in which a ⳱ a, falls away into the improper. Using your mouth in one way or another is to lie and fall into the improper. When you are eating, you are not eating; when you are speaking; you are saying something that falls away from the meaning of the truth, from the center of itself, from propriety, and from the proper. This would all be well and good if only it were limited to the contents of narrative, to characterial deployment, or to the vagaries of plots. But it is narrative itself that is sick, narrative itself that can no longer be proper, the figuration of the modern narrative as illustrated, ironically, by Balzac in the Come´die humaine and of which this narrative is both the synecdoche and the repository of its affects. He writes of Le Neveu de Rameau, but he might just as well be writing of La Come´die humaine: ‘‘this book, sloppy on purpose to show its wounds.’’84 Is it at all astonishing that this texte mis a` nu, that of Diderot or that, here, of Balzac,

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relates the improper of skepticism to the improper totalizing mechanisms of modernity: ‘‘omnipotence, omniscience, and ‘fungibility’ of money’’?85 If we understand omnipotence and omniscience as figures not only related to the economic but also to the narrative, we are heading toward an understanding of this denuded text, in which we could best translate ‘‘omniconvenance’’ as fungibility, not only of money, but also, and especially, of narrative. The narrative is, first of all, a concatenated mess of vermicelli or macaroni, with no order. If Goriot knew how to make money ejusdem farinae, bringing order to noodles, the world is generally in a state of disorder; modernity is already subject to the dissolution of the master narrative, that is, the literary narrative whose disappearance has already been decried. Goriot’s vermicelli become macaroni, but the situation is the same: ‘‘This is our new style, sentences that pursue their paths as the macaroni did earlier.’’86 The state of modernity, reflected directly in modern narrative, is one of competition with competing voices, a polyphony best illustrated in a church scene of one of the other narrative threads in which, not coincidentally, Taillefer pe`re appears: ‘‘Farewell, Werbrust, as he heard the Dies Irae, I am thinking about my poor son too much.’’87 This, by the way, is perhaps the only scene in the novel in which no one is taking advantage of anyone else. In this scene, a set of voices are set in fugal form with, in a master touch, the Dies Irae serving as the basso ostinato. And it is up to the narrator pro tem, Bixiou, to unite the voices in one narrative voice, even as he varies the latter: ‘‘He really made us hear every movement made in a church. Bixiou imitated everything.’’88 In the end, it will all be a game of propriety and impropriety. Clearly, in the modern age, there is a French version of the British improper and that is the loss of the literary. When Bixiou says to his fellow diners that ‘‘the improper is taking us over’’ (l’improper nous gagne),89 he does not for a moment mean that British puritanism and sexual hypocrisy have invaded France. Far from it. He means rather that the literary has lost to the venal, the mundane, and the fungible; Art has been replaced by the circulation of goods, money, women, and discourses. There is no place for Art, which he later defines relative to Le Misanthrope as follows: ‘‘Art consists of building a palace on the tip of a needle.’’90 This is a reverse pyramid in which words can belong to anyone and in which the basic building blocks of narrative, such as plot and characters, have themselves been shown to be fictions, narratemes that have no intrinsic meaning, worth, or value. All is improper in this most venal of possible worlds: Bixiou suggests crying for Candide,91 and we must take him at his word, for Candide is not of this world, but of one long gone.

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What then can we conclude about the aporias of narrative for Balzac? If we understand the building blocks of narrative as being for him the fictions and not the truths on which he builds, then the role of the Balzacian narrator is to capitalize as Vautrin has done, as Nucingen has done, as the invisible listener given to espionage has done in this narrative. Bixiou has it right: it little matters how this knowledge is attained; it is simply important that the tale be told. Or rather that a tale be told: it hardly seems important that these narrative threads will never form an interesting enough braid to lead the readers from point A to point B. We just need to feel that we believe in the power of narrative to do so, even if it does not have that power. For narrative too, at least in this modern incarnation, is a pyramid scheme played with the reader—but with one difference. Unlike Godefroid and the others, the reader is in on the game; a willing participant, he or she is not conned and therefore not screwed, for the reader always knows and the narrator knows that the reader knows. As La Maison Nucingen so rightly concludes: —Oh, there were people in the next room, said Finot who heard us leave. —There are always people in the next room, answered Bixiou, who must have been in his cups.92

Would modern narrative then be under the sign of Bacchus? Perhaps, though not in the most basic sense: the improper, the locus of sparagmos, the motley, and the polyphonic are united for a moment by the symbolic act of narrative itself, narrative that forms the beginning of the end of the master narratives, even as, under the hand of Balzac, it seems to start to firm up in the guise of the omniscient, omnipotent narrator. Yet we should never forget that he is ‘‘omniconvenant’’ as well, not a fixed god, but a fungible figure telling tales out of school. And readers of Balzac are all the better off for it.

‘‘Sarrasine’’: The Portcullis of Genders Just as Rousseau’s Essai sur l’origine des langues was discovered, rediscovered, or made widely-known to non-specialists through the lens of Jacques Derrida’s epoch-making De la grammatologie, Balzac’s ‘‘Sarrasine’’ entered the canon, from which it had long been marginalized, even for Balzacians, through Roland Barthes’s revolutionary S/Z. Initially given as a seminar in 1968 and 1969, Barthes’s work, along with Derrida’s, led from structuralism to various versions of poststructuralism; this was arguably the birth of ‘‘French theory’’ in its poststructuralist or deconstructive mode. Barthes’s

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goal was not really to analyze a fairly obscure work of a canonic writer; rather, he seems to be taking on structuralism in S/Z: even if the five codes were a continuation, through semiotics, of structuralism, the riffs and asides that form the bulk of S/Z are far more aligned with what will become deconstruction.93 Barbara Johnson speculates that one of the reasons that ‘‘Barthes might have chosen this text’’ is that ‘‘it explicitly thematizes the opposition between unity and fragmentation, between the idealized signified and the discontinuous empty play of signifiers.’’94 While I would quarrel with the use of the word ‘‘empty,’’ I would agree in general and add the thought that the story seems to be a mise-en-abyme of the process of fragmentation into lexemes that is Barthes’s modus operandi, and that the ‘‘play of signifiers’’ is itself the illustration of what poststructuralism and deconstruction (which I am artificially separating to make the field a bit more capacious) will use as the strategy of reading and rewriting. If Barthes woke his readers up to ‘‘Sarrasine,’’ for which we owe him an immense debt of gratitude, I am also suggesting that we need to reread ‘‘Sarrasine’’ with S/Z put temporarily in brackets.95 In particular, ‘‘Sarrasine’’ has resonance both with other works by Balzac that problematize sexuality and gender, including the entire Vautrin cycle (Le Pe`re Goriot, Illusions perdues, and Splendeurs et mise`res), La Fille aux yeux d’or, and ‘‘Se´raphıˆta,’’ along with the two late novels, Le Cousin Pons and La Cousine Bette, as well as with other gender-bending novels of the mid-nineteenth century that include Gautier’s Mademoiselle Maupin, Sand’s novel in dialogue, Gabriel, and Belot’s Mademoiselle Giraud, ma femme.96 I shall limit myself here to a study of ‘‘Sarrasine,’’ with the specific goal of showing how narrative, figures of dialogue, and stance color the representation of a reality that cannot be directly revealed but that winds up being the sex that dare not speak its name. In particular, I shall show how in this strange text, the author resorts to an odd figure, not just castration or its refigurations, to express this impossibility. In ‘‘Sarrasine,’’ neither description nor dialogue nor narration can fully render gender-bending matters. While Balzac does not fall into Gautier’s romanticism or go as far as Sand’s total eschewing of extradiegetic narrative in Gabriel, this is one of the rare cases in La Come´die humaine in which he severely limits narrative capacity, in which he is as far away from the reliable third-person omniscient narrator as possible. This not only due to the fact that the narrator has to maintain the secret of Zambinella’s identity and ‘‘shortcomings,’’ but also because the narrative position has to be, with or

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without irony, that determined by a heteronormative voice; in ‘‘Sarrasine,’’ Balzac relies on an extradiegetic first-person narrator to accomplish this.97 The author queers the narrative in ways not developed by Barthes, through a give-and-take position of a narrator who relies on dialogue to tell much of the unspeakable truth and who withholds information in a ‘‘delayed revelation of a sexual secret’’ to make the story suspenseful.98 The first part of the narrative is a wandering through a salon, with narrative observation, worldly dialogue, and classic Balzacian narration all mixing to create a situation in which the knowledge of the observer is both augmented and diminished by the process. The technique is much like a moving frieze or an ekphrasis parlayed into a series of seamless moments; in other words, it is a cinematic traveling shot before its time. It is augmented in that the observer or reader benefits from the information parceled out by the narrator who situates the Lanty family relative to other figures in La Come´die humaine, as he compares their wealth to that of the Nucingen family, among others. But it is diminished, in that every set of answers seems also to provoke a series of rhetorical questions about the origins of the family, the source of their fortune, their past family history, and so forth. Unlike Barthes then, with his theory of the five codes, a theory weakened purposefully by the asides in the text that wind up being the deconstruction of any narrative, semiotic, or structuralist system, I see this initial setting as the willful confusion, not only of origins and history, but also of sexualities, as if this mise-en-sce`ne were itself the teleological muddling of the place in which sexualities and genders are defined. Rather than being just the worldly setting for a story among others, this beginning, with its endless questions and doubts, can and should be seen in any rereading, as the disruption of order and conformity. Balzac constructs stereotypical images of fixed genders and sexualities in the Comtesse de Lanty and her children, but sets them against the disorderly background of the narrative hermeneutics, so that when we finally arrive at the crucial question of the text, we are retrospectively forced to reconsider the functions of the stereotype in the formation of narrative order. This is clear from Balzac’s gloss ‘‘This mysterious family had all the attraction of a poem by Lord Byron, whose difficulties were translated differently by each member of Society: an obscure song that was sublime from stanza to stanza.’’99 And at the end of the very same paragraph, Balzac reinforces the enigma with another literary reference: ‘‘But, sadly, the enigmatic story of the Lanty household was the constant object of the curious, much like Ann Radcliffe’s novels.’’100 Balzac is reminding his readers that this is

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literature, not life, and specifically, that this is a realist gloss on romantic literature and not a direct representation of contemporary society. So he chooses the bisexual Lord Byron and the mistress of the Gothic to provide the network into which he can insert his epicene character of La Zambinella. In the paragraph immediately following the one in which Byron and Radcliffe are set up as titular gods, La Zambinella is introduced and qualified as ‘‘strange.’’101 This strangeness is strangely deferred to the end of the sentence, whose entire weight bears down on that one word, and, simultaneously, that one word perverts—for that is the word—the entire, long sentence. The long sentence moves from observers through social events like balls, parties, and concerts to wind up at this ‘‘strange character.’’102 Balzac quickly adds, in counterpoint to the long, winding, almost Proustian sentence, ‘‘It was a man’’ (C’e´tait un homme). This strangeness turns all of society on its head, whether it be the bourgeois capitalism of the first part of the sentence or the social structure of the middle. La Zambinella’s presence queers the world that has neat exchanges about money and social life and that has decided what the value, economic or symbolic, of each part of the social structure is; the entrance of this strange figure puts that order and value in doubt. For the moment, it is not clear why, but if we read the story the way we read other Balzac works (or those of Proust, for example) in which there is an element of surprise relative to sexuality, we know we have to read it twice, once naively—but can this be done after S/Z?—and once with the knowledge that La Zambinella is always already castrated and the passive partner in acts of homosexual anal sex, and that Sarrasine is always already dead. Further on, under the sign of ‘‘one of the most rare caprices of nature,’’103 La Zambinella appears, just as his niece, Marianina is finishing singing the cavatina from Tancredi. But the cavatina in Rossini’s opera is sung not by a soprano but by a mezzo in the pants role of the young soldier.104 And while Balzac compares Marianina to both sopranos and mezzi,105 it is in the interest of verisimilitude to imagine that this sixteen-year old girl is a soprano; it would be unseemly for her directly to sing a pants role.106 Thus does Balzac have the narrative mime the re´cit and vice versa. Balzac’s narrative is not so much a seamless fabric of the five codes as it is a multiply penetrable network of nodes and holes, a Derridean, Deleuzian, or even Foucauldian production to which Barthes’s critical text points but at which it does not arrive. Here, the work shows how gaps in the story as well as those in the narrative framework are in a game of hide-and-go-seek or peek-a-boo or a

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masquerade in which no one can be certain who is wearing the pants or who is being penetrated. La Zambinella’s arrival corresponds to a shift in sexual roles and gender identities on multiple levels: in the performance of the opera, in the performance of the aria, in the retrospective glance to the past that will soon take place after the entrance of Sarrasine into Rome, his meeting La Zambinella, and his misprision of her. Balzac certainly accomplishes this in part, as Barthes often notes, through a use of the negative, the privative that is the mark of castration. But Balzac also uses that negative because there is not yet any proper name for what he wants to talk about. So to describe Vautrin’s homosexuality, and to do so in front of a woman in particular, the somewhat rude police inspector, Gondureau, explains to Poiret and Michonneau, ‘‘Learn a secret: he does not like women.’’107 Yet Balzac is complicating matters more in ‘‘Sarrasine’’ than in Le Pe`re Goriot, for in the latter he is merely attesting the presence of an invert or a member of the third sex. In ‘‘Sarrasine,’’ both characters are uncategorizable: the castrato does not fit into any neat category. And what can we make of Sarrasine, who is purportedly ‘‘heterosexual,’’ but who wants to sleep with a woman who is really a man? Balzac’s scenario is far more complex than the castration on which Barthes and Johnson, among others, rather narrowly focus, because Zambinella’s missing testicles reappear as an imaginary graft onto the body of the mezzo-soprano playing the title role in Tancredi.108 As the story progresses, Balzac opens up the text, literally and figuratively, to a pattern of lines and holes that turn it into a network in which no nodal point is clear and in which there is no phallocentric position, no nom du pe`re: the Comte de Lanty is significantly absent from the scenario and it is perhaps only the invisible cardinal Cicognara, who sends his men to kill Sarrasine, who is the bearer of the phallus. This shifting position of genders and sexualities, while perhaps becoming clearer to the clued-in reader, affects both Zambinella and Sarrasine: the first, because it is becoming ever clearer who he is, the latter because it is becoming less and less clear who he was. Balzac drops clues to Zambinella’s identity as the old man: there is, for example, the portrait, which is ‘‘too beautiful for a man.’’109 And when the narrator is questioned, he stammers his answer: ‘‘I think, I told her, that this Adonis represents a . . . a . . . a relative of Madame de Lanty.’’110 Any reader must give pause. And later, when the story has started, Madame de Rochefide interrupts: —But, Madame de Rochefide interrupted me, I still do not see either Marianina or her little old man.

Balzac: Enallages and Twists 51 —You see only him!, I exclaimed, impatient as an author would be whose dramatic twist had failed.111

I contend that the two figures blend into one another. And that contention is in part subtended by etymology: ‘‘sarrasine’’ is not only the name of the character but is also a common noun that means ‘‘portcullis,’’ which, according to the Oxford English Dictionary is a ‘‘strong barrier in the form of a grating of wooden or iron bars, usually suspended by chains above the gateway of a fortress, a fortified town, etc., and able to secure the entrance quickly by being released to slide down vertical grooves in the sides of the gateway.’’ Thus this lattice-shaped barrier with its chiaroscuro patterns and its interplay of light and dark or hard phallic bars and penetrable holes, is the figure for both the characters, as well as for the penetrating daggers of the end of the story and the actions of the chisel that are the chosen profession of Sarrasine. Zambinella assumes his femininity with an outfit that leaves no doubts: ‘‘The unknown individual was wearing a white embroidered waistcoat, and his linens were of a dazzling whiteness. A frill of rather rustcolored English lace whose richness would have been envied by a queer, formed yellow honeycombs on his chest, but on him, this lace was more a tatter than an ornament.’’112 But it is not simply that he is effeminate— Balzac speaks in the same paragraph of ‘‘the feminine coquetry of this phantasmagorical person’’113 and indicates that he wears earrings—but it is that he illustrates Sarrasine’s name with the honeycomb, the beehive, and the lace that mark his one-time admirer. Everything points to an equivalence between the two, between the name and the illustration, between the painting and the character, and between the sculpture and the name of the character. Balzac makes Sarrasine a general arts student at first but then ensures that his hapless artist becomes a sculptor, and when he whittles a Christ-shaped statue, ‘‘the impiety engraved on this statue was too much for the artist not to be punished.’’114 Balzac is being delicate because his anonymous narrator is talking to a young lady; it is a fair hypothesis to assume that the statue probably has an erection. Why sculpture? There is a narrative reason and a historical one. The narrative reason should be apparent. Sarrasine’s activity as a sculptor, as an artist who removes, according to Michelangelo, what ‘‘is not the statue,’’ performs an act of cutting off that mimes the castration of La Zambinella. The historical and extratextual reason, however, is strangely compelling, for it adds to the text in an unseen way, and underlines the notion of gaps, castration, and barriers.

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Cardinal Cicognara seems possibly to have been named for the real Leopoldo Cicognara, an Italian count (1767–1834) and a figure in the art world with whom Balzac was undoubtedly familiar. His most famous work is entitled Storia della scultura dal suo risorgimento in Italia al secolo di Napoleone (History of Sculpture from Its Rise in Italy through the Century of Napoleon). Balzac inserts Sarrasine and the Cardinal as figures of each other. Each of the three figures becomes the figure of the other two and the seeming phallic inviolability of the cardinal is undercut by this historical moment, so that when his spadassins enter and stab Sarrasine with stilettoes, it is an odd reconfiguration of the figure of the cardinal. In the retrospective story, the narrator makes great efforts both to tell the reader that Zambinella is a man and to tell Madame de Rochefide that he is a woman. He creates a nonderivative femininity for La Zambinella, except to the extent that it is a shared model of beauty that observes classical lines and stereotypes. The beauty is always parsed through the eyes of Sarrasine: ‘‘Zambinella united, lively and delicate, those exquisite proportions of feminine nature that were so ardently desired, of which a scupltor is, at the same time the severest and the most passionate judge.’’115 Beauty is made for desirability and not simply for aesthetic pleasure, and that beauty is immediately transformative, marking Sarrasine as a pile of rubble or ruins. This is not castration but a fragmentation of the artist who cannot help himself: ‘‘Glory, science, the future, existence, crowns, all collapsed. ‘To be loved by her or die’ was the rule Sarrasine made for himself.’’116 Moreover, only the perception that he is loved reconstructs him: ‘‘She gave Sarrasine one of those eloquent glances that often say much more than women want. The look was a complete revelation: Sarrasine was loved!’’117 But Balzac uses one of his classic devices to create a situation of captatio benevolentiae, that is to say, ‘‘one of those glances,’’ a device by which he has the reader or listener refer to a shared stereotype, and here it is within the context of the narrator talking to a woman of the world who must know what feminine wiles are, though she clearly does not know that La Zambinella is not a woman. More importantly, Balzac uses a device that is rather rare in his writing, discours indirect libre in ‘‘Sarrasine was loved!’’ Arguably, this could merely be a sign of the narrator’s enthusiasm for the story he is telling, for the desire he thinks he is inspiring in Madame de Rochefide, or for the excitement he is developing in petto because he knows the surprise ending to the story. A more interesting approach would be to consider that the exclamation point is a sign that Sarrasine is reconstructed and rebuilt as an object, no longer a subject, of the perverse desire (or the imagined desire of La Zambinella). So

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Sarrasine is reconstructed in her eyes: just as he has constructed her as an ideal woman, she has reconstructed him, but from the point of view of a man who is a woman. Rebuilt in her image, reconstructed through the wound that she is, recreated as Tancredi who will die, the reconstructed Sarrasine is the portcullis, the stilettos, the wounds, and his own death. He is reborn, but as his own vulnerability and mortality. Penetrating glances or the stare of the transvestite Medusa: it little matters as he is condemned by his objectification. Arguably, this objectification can be understood psychoanalytically in a manner that would see the stare of the transvestite medusa as the metonym of the fabled vagina dentata, though the irony here is that the vagina dentata does not exist since we are dealing with a castrato. Still, it is the position of the feminine, the imaginary and imagined position of the feminine, that produces this hiccup in the symbolic order. Narrative is a double masquerade, in form and in contents: in contents because of the position of La Zambinella as a false woman who by his/her nature puts notions of masculinity into question; in form because the narrator both holds back information and mimes the impossible position of the omniscient Balzacian narrator, thereby questioning notions of independent subjectivity. If the narrator can penetrate Sarrasine’s mind and have knowledge of his intimate thoughts and feelings long after his death, he is, in essence, penetrating Sarrasine in a very literal fashion. And Sarrasine’s portcullis retroactively becomes false protection from the narrative battering ram. The narrator thus is both a reliable and an unreliable narrator: reliable as an extradiegetic figure who mimes the position of an omniscient narrator, but unreliable because he is lying to Madame de Rochefide, even as we realize, as readers more sophisticated than she is, what is at stake and what he is dissimulating. This dissimulation begins to form a pattern of cachotteries in which there is a trope of hiding something that is not there. On the one hand, it is a hiding of an absence, the results of the castration that so interests Barthes. On the other, it is a hiding of the feminine that is not there but that is implicated. Thus, ‘‘Zambinella, I continued, smiling, had boldly crossed her legs and moved in bouncing the upper one.’’118 The narrator implies perhaps that La Zambinella is engaging in an act of self-stimulation, a dirty secret that Madame de Rochefide would understand without ever having to discuss it. And yet that stimulation does not take place, at least in the way implied. Similarly, we find: ‘‘Her chest, whose treasures were hidden by lace . . .’’119 But there are no treasures to hide and the lace, that beehive pattern or portcullis that protects the imaginary, repeats the same

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patterns: the portcullis offers no protection of the real, but rather protects the imaginary feminine and the symbolically emasculated masculine from the eyes of the heteronormative order. Because the narrator cannot reveal the hidden reality of Sarrasine’s desire, a reality unknown to him—that this is same-sex desire despite all appearances—Sarrasine becomes very much an affect in the narrator’s tale. Penetrated but unable to penetrate, Sarrasine becomes the true figure of the feminine in this tale of transgression and travesty. The further the narrator goes in his story-telling, the more he has to dissimulate. This means that he has to hide the fact that La Zambinella is not a woman or the fact that he is a man, but it also means that he has to dissimulate his impossible position of narration as well as the relative absence of Sarrasine from his own story. Balzac willfully conflates these seemingly separate positions so that the dissimulations of the masculine and the travesties of narration become one and the same. The result is an insistence on artifice, a refragmentation of figures, and the decided inclination to a construction of gender through narrative art, not through biology: When Vitigliani uncorked the first bottle of champagne, Sarrasine read in his neighbor’s eyes a rather lively fear of the little detonation produced by the gas. The involuntary wincing of this feminine organism [organisation] was interpreted by the artist-lover as the sign of excessive sensitivity. This weakness charmed the Frenchman. So much protection enters the love a man has.120

The narrator cannot possibly know what he knows, for Sarrasine is long dead and it is certain that the Lanty family did not tell tales out of school. But it is clear from the word ‘‘organisation’’ that Balzac is insisting on the creation of the masculine and the feminine, the arbitrary assignment of gender roles, through narrative construction. This is not exactly the model of social constructivism for gender espoused in revisionist versions of Foucault’s Histoire de la sexualite´, but it is a recognition that gender is constructed through language, and specifically through the authorization that comes with the imposition of omniscient narrative on subjectivity. Balzac is implicitly arguing here, as he does in Le Pe`re Goriot, Illusions perdues, Splendeurs et mise`res, and La Fille aux yeux d’or, among other works, that the position of the sexual other is always already objectified through language. The position of the sexual dissident is organized through language. So then Vautrin/Herrera, for example is organized by language as other to the heterocratic and phallocentric order of the bourgeois world.

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Similarly, in La Fille aux yeux d’or, Paquita is determined as other by a language that objectifies her. Yet that otherness in turn determines, through language, the position of those who love her, and both the Duchesse de San-Re´al and de Marsay wind up being determined by the inscription of desire through narrative imposition. In the end, the existence of otherness that is both explained by and dissimulated through narrative travesty objectifies all others, not only the sexual dissidents, not only women (one could think of ‘‘La Femme abandonne´e,’’ among other works) but all characters, regardless of their sexual proclivities or gender. It is not, again, the desire of the desire of another in the Girardian sense that determines position, but rather the narrative of the narrative of another. And La Zambinella and Sarrasine are merely the best exempla of that positionality. If we omit the kitschy machismo associated with Sarrasine’s bravery in crushing the head of a snake that has scared La Zambinella during a bucolic outing,121 much of the rest of the story is devoted to creating an increasingly vulnerable position for the objectified Sarrasine. For example, at a party, Sarrasine grabs La Zambinella and drags her off to a ‘‘boudoir.’’ But Zambinella has a dagger,122 and there is the distinct possibility that Sarrasine will be penetrated by it; Balzac is building Sarrasine’s vulnerability: the portcullis that he is, when he is objectified through the narrative of travesty, is less and less a protection and more and more a possible opening. In fact, Balzac uses the last part of the story to start to open up the narrative to the possibility, for the intradiegetic destinataire in the frame tale that is Madame de Rochefide, of gender confusion, travesty, castration, homosexuality, and related issues. As Sarrasine becomes more intimate with La Zambinella, as they are alone, albeit with the invisible, omniscient narrator who walks beside them, La Zambinella espouses a rhetorical position that opens her up, so to speak, to speculation about possibly dissident sexuality. As is the case with Gondureau’s negative remark about Vautrin, Balzac starts this process with a negativity. In this case, it is not a linguistic one, but one based on desire, or on the lack thereof; Zambinella says to Sarrasine, ‘‘I abhor men perhaps even more than I hate women.’’123 But the process soon turns to two remarks that place La Zambinella strangely but squarely in the sexually indeterminate. First, using the masculine form of ‘‘friend,’’ La Zambinella stresses her fraternity: ‘‘I can be a devoted friend [ami] for you, as I admire your force and your personality.’’124 While this is not a unique use of ‘‘ami,’’ even though the term ‘‘amie’’ exists—Colette will use it in Che´ri as the title character asks his mistress Le´a if

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she will be a ‘‘brother’’ for him—it is certainly not common to use it, especially at this point, when gender roles and behaviors are still so codified. But the iconoclasm of the remark is soon seconded by the rhetorical speculation that follows, as she wonders how things would be if she were not a woman.125 This seeming epitome and paragon of femininity is putting her own gender in doubt and, in so doing, is putting in doubt the nature of Sarrasine’s desire, which may in fact be same-sex attraction and not ‘‘normal’’ heterosexuality. And when s/he says, ‘‘I have no heart!’’126 we are now all certain that that is not all s/he does not have and certain of what she does have. As the story moves to its inexorable conclusion, the role reversal is finally complete. La Zambinella uses language much as the narrator does, as a penetrating, marking tool that objectifies the other by feminizing him compared to the masculinity of narrative itself, and her every word is taken to be the ‘‘stinger’’ (aiguillon) of an insect.127 Language becomes the tool that marks the position of the vulnerable, and Sarrasine becomes marked, much as Vautrin’s back will be marked, by the powerful narrative of the phallic Other, as vulnerable and feminine: That morning went by too quickly for the sculptor in love, but it was filled with lots of incidents that revealed the coquetry, weakness, and pretense of that soft soul without energy. It was the woman with her sudden fears, her impulses without reason, her instinctive troubles, her brazenness without a cause, her acts of bravado and her fine delicacy of feeling.128

Out of empathy, Sarrasine has been penetrated by La Zambinella’s feelings and emotions and has become her. Sarrasine has not only internalized La Zambinella’s castration or been castrated just as s/he has been, but has also become the ‘‘organisation’’ that is woman, that set of absent open markings that define a space of negativity. It is thus appropriate that the revelation of Zambinella’s true sexual identity does not happen through a mise-a`-nu of the body, but through an additional travesty or act of cross-dressing, as La Zambinella is seen by Sarrasine dressed as a man: ‘‘ ‘Was it undoubtedly out of respect for the cardinals, the bishops, and the priests here,’ asked Sarrasine, ‘that she is dressed as a man . . . and has a sword at her side?’ ’’129 The elder gentleman to whom Sarrasine asks this question responds incredulously, with a set of rhetorical questions worded in the negative: ‘‘Has there ever been a woman on stage in Rome? And do you not know by what

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creatures women’s roles are performed in the Papal States?’’130 The transformation and travesty are now complete. La Zambinella loses his definite article as language itself untravesties what it has long hidden from Madame de Rochefide, and he soon becomes ‘‘il.’’131 Sarrasine is now always already penetrated—the word is Balzac’s—by the truth of narrative authority, which Balzac calls ‘‘an awful truth.’’132 Zambinella had been cut on the outside, significantly due to the efforts of the same person, the Prince Chigi, who reveals the truth to Sarrasine that it was indeed he who ‘‘endowed’’ Zambinella with his/her voice;133 that is to say, his endowment enabled the castration of the future singer. Sarrasine has been cut to the quick, penetrated by language, far more deeply than any surface cut, no matter how transformative it has been. The end comes quickly as language and action meet in simultaneity in a double piercing of the portcullis that will have been Sarrasine: ‘‘Zambinella screamed piercing cries. At that moment, three men came in, and suddently, the sculptor fell, pierced by three dagger blows.’’134 And the portcullis is closed (or open) forever.

2.

Flaubert and Zola: Challenges to Verisimilitude

Flaubert and the Art of Self-Subversion Each of the canonic realist novelists—Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola—takes a pessimistic view of human happiness. This position is consonant with the representation of the changing world of the nineteenth century in which the ever-advancing institutions of capitalism and the bourgeoisie as well as the ideological state apparatuses supporting them, not least the effects of urbanization, lead many novelists of the time to paint rather bleak pictures of the world surrounding them. Despite the negative pictures they often paint, Balzac and Zola do believe in progress and progress narratives. For the latter, of course, this progress is often in conflict with his belief in decadence and decline; yet counterbalancing the pessimism of Germinal and La Beˆte humaine is the optimism of Le Docteur Pascal. As for Stendhal, in spite of the unhappy endings of works such as Le Rouge et le noir and La Chartreuse de Parme, this author does at least believe in a future in which the ‘‘happy few’’ will be present. Alone of the four major realist writers, Flaubert stands out as the one who shows no belief in a progress narrative. His characters fail repeatedly and decline almost from the very beginning of his narratives, and there is no belief, except on the part of some of his hapless protagonists, that things may ever get better. Each of his works is a construct of insufficiencies on the level of plot and in the formation of character; the depicted world, while arguably realistic, often seems a slightly lesser version of the real world. His characters’ foibles are seldom explored with sympathy: there will be no tragedy here, just a kind of dedramatized apathy marking the passage of time toward inevitable mediocrity or decline. From his earliest writing, Flaubert is necessarily at odds with the ideological production of the reality that surrounds him. That is to say, there is a progress narrative implicit in the nineteenth century’s construction of itself and Flaubert’s pessimism or his espousal of failure as an object of study cannot represent reality in its own terms, precisely because constructions of 58

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nineteenth-century reality depend for coherence on that concept of progress to proceed. Clearly, not all authors are wide-eyed Pollyannas with naive views of human nature, urbanization, or the loss of tradition. None of the important realist authors in any national tradition eschew the darker side of human nature, and at one point or another many take on the down-side of progress, whether it is Galdo´s in La de Bringas offering a critique of nascent consumerism (as Flaubert offers in Madame Bovary and Zola in Au bonheur des dames) or Eliot offering a critique of sterile knowledge for its own sake in Middlemarch, just to offer two examples. But, for all that, there is the belief in progress, often scientific or medical in nature in works as different as Middlemarch, Le Docteur Pascal, and Mont-Oriol. Decline and decadence may be there, but progress will trump them, except in Flaubert’s case.1 A glance at Flaubert’s correspondence allows us to think about this author’s notion of failure. Whereas an author can attest to his or her own progress, feelings, failure, or frustrations about writing—in the sense that Roland Barthes gives writing as an end en soi—the author is certainly no guarantor of the meaning of the fictional text produced. The author is one reader among many: he or she can attest to intention, or perhaps more accurately rhetorically state a misprision of his or her own intention, but that is not the same thing as guaranteeing the meaning of the literary work outside the author’s correspondence. Books have their own fate, as the old expression goes, and they are soon autonomous. Nevertheless, the correspondence is symptomatic of what this fledgling writer is going through as he attempts to produce a work of fiction that will stand on its own. That need for a freestanding objet d’art that does not rely on objective representation or even on the simulacra of verisimilitude always already puts notions of the verisimilar into question in Flaubert’s narratives. From his correspondence, we easily recognize that the author struggles while trying to produce what will become his first masterpiece, Madame Bovary. For example, in a letter to Louise Colet dated 24 April 1852, Flaubert complains about his slow pace and indicates that he has written only twenty-five pages in the six weeks since he last saw her.2 His general plan is in place for the novel and he indicates that he will start to write the ball scene for Madame Bovary on Monday. The process is problematic, for the slowness of the progress is producing a kind of lassitude in him, a sort of self-defeat, as he says that he is ‘‘bothered at not making progress’’ (ennuye´ de ne pas avancer). So it is more than just disappointment, but ennui, a boredom, and a Weltschmerz that weigh heavily on him. Failure then is always imminent, if even progress can produce this feeling.

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Part of the reason for the slowness is the constant rewriting and reorganization of the material, which, according to the same letter, he is constantly reworking. Progress is illusory, because the work done is constantly undone, almost as if Flaubert were Penelope undoing her sewing every night so her canvas would never be finished, or as if he were Sisyphus condemned to repeat his task ad infinitum. Whether he has an inner demon or an external one, Flaubert is possessed. Moreover, the undoing of his work negates what he has previously written: the series of rewrites is a constant condemnation of his writing, of his approach to writing, of his approach with writing. Whatever progress there is comes at the expense of seeing value in his writing. Whatever word he writes is only minimally better than yesterday’s failure. This failure as an artist is also ambiguously interwoven with failure as an individual: ‘‘Sometimes, when I find myself empty, when the expression does not come, when, after having scrawled long pages, I find that I haven’t written a sentence, I fall on my couch and remain there in an internal swamp of troubles.’’3 If he does not make progress despite intensive work, there is a dissipation after the recognition that the work was all for naught. From impotence as an artist he automatically discerns an impotence as an individual, a lack of success, and a disorder in his very being. So the scrawlings, which are a kind of disordered writing, lead naturally and inevitably to disorder within. Scrawlings become a swamp of troubles (ennuis), in that curious French combination of boredom and trouble tinged with melancholy. Failure is infectious. What will happen, one wonders, if the subject itself is failure? Will there be an overflow of that failure into all corners of being? Before turning to that, let us consider a strategy around it. In his magisterial and massive study of Flaubert’s life and writing before Madame Bovary, entitled appropriately enough L’Idiot de la famille, Jean-Paul Sartre has created a somewhat materialist, existentialist psychoanalysis of the individual Gustave Flaubert. Sartre’s explanation goes on for well over twenty-five hundred pages, and he suggests at length that Flaubert’s coming to language would inevitably be a losing battle. Sartre underlines an insoluble set of problems for Flaubert. Coming to language late means that he can never write the famous ‘‘book about nothing,’’4 for there always will have been something there before him. If that something is a living thing, bringing his language to it means killing what is there in order to have that nothing. Sartre puts it very early in L’Idiot, where he says that for Flaubert, analyzing is the equivalent of killing.5 If, however, writing is tantamount to an act of murder, it is not the worst thing, for there is something that cannot be killed: stupidity, as Franc¸oise Gaillard has so aptly noted. Sartre puts it

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pithily: ‘‘Of stupidity as substance.’’6 It is the subject of writing. Flaubert will always face the undead of language, vampires of stupid opinion, and the intransigence and inevitability of the doxa that can never be killed with a swift stab of the stiletto. Whatever the path taken, he will fail to conquer the inevitable demons: the material world that demands some scant recognition, however feeble, and the juggernaut of stupidity. And that will interfere with the desired project of producing a book about nothing; the presence of the real, or even the remains of reality in the novels, will deform nothing’s representation, as the presence of the object collides with the transparency of language. So from Sartre’s point of view, one might argue, realist representation is impossible for Flaubert, precisely because of the unreal and unrepresentable figures he chooses to represent, or, more likely here, figures that choose or inhabit him through a combination of social construction through the processes of development and some hidden demon of hellish origins that lives within his brain. Killing would be easy to show, were it not always underpinned by stupidity, yet that stupidity might be in the realm of the representable were there a unifying trope, figure, or pattern. But the author ensures the impossibility of representation by creating a dynamic in which everything is always already fragmented and in which the pieces can never be reassembled through the imposition of linguistic, grammatical, or syntactic glue. For Flaubert does not start with murdersome analysis or even stupidity, but with fragmentation. In the early work Novembre, rather than present a movement toward a solidification of knowledge, the author chooses to emphasize the partial and subjective nature of his narrator’s knowledge, as Tim Unwin has deftly shown;7 he proposes a present attached to a lived, nonliterary past: ‘‘For a long time, I tasted my lost life; I told myself with joy that my youth was over, for it is a joy to feel the cold in your heart, and to be able to say, feeling it with a hand like a house still smoking: it is no longer burning.’’8 By his choice of words and by the ambiguous nostalgia in this implicit movement toward death, the narrator inscribes his protagonist in a Romantic tradition marked by loss. Thus the stage is set for one of the major articulations of failure: the persistence of romantic longing doomed to fail in a realist world. Whether it is the failed relationships or unrequited loves in the various versions of L’E´ducation sentimentale or the bathetic love affairs of Emma Bovary, romantic and Romantic loves are doomed to fail. Flaubert bundles that failure early on by joining linguistic inadequacy to the failure of desire to be fulfilled. He will eventually let that situation mutate, as he

62 Flaubert and Zola: Challenges to Verisimilitude

moves toward a solidification of the narrator’s position in an omniscient third-person narrative, while shifting the linguistic and emotional failure entirely onto his characters and marking them as the victims of the doxa. Love is illusory and must be surpassed to achieve the recognition of disillusion (not dissolution). For the young Flaubert, life itself is already marked as incapable of being a success: ‘‘the eternal monotony of life’s hours that flow by and its days that return.’’9 Life is repetition, much as the act of writing will be, for Flaubert’s struggles with the redaction of Madame Bovary will also be that Sisyphean repetition with no Camus-like redemption in imagining that Sisyphus is happy. In Novembre, the individual feels the weight of that repetition and, in that he cannot create, progress, or develop, he feels condemned. This failure is cast as isolation, in that he is different from others, those who have the illusion (a false one already in Flaubert’s mind) that they can progress: ‘‘What to do down here? What to dream? What to build? Tell me then, you whom life amuses, who walks toward a goal, and who torments himself over something!’’10 If the anaphoric apostrophe is a mark of a lingering sign of romanticism, it is also the case that the figure of the telos will be a sign of archetypal realist plots, culminating most notably in Maupassant’s Bel Ami. Flaubert begins to solidify the narrative discourse in the first version of L’E´ducation sentimentale, even as he alternates between a more objective third-person narrative and epistolary interludes between Jules and Henry. Significantly, Flaubert takes a different strategy from the very first, as if he were separating the narrative function from the characters: ‘‘One October morning, the heroes of this book arrived in Paris with an eighteen-yearold heart and a high school diploma in literature.’’11 By separating the two functions, Flaubert moves toward a lack of failure in style, in order to talk magisterially about what remains a failure in the verisimilar world of his characters; in a sense, the world of ‘‘this book’’ is separated from the world depicted in the book; he sacrifices the latter in favor of a solipsistic version of the former. If we already have an inkling that a ‘‘sentimental education’’ will be a lesson in disillusion for Henry and an ultimate failure, Flaubert can, at least for now, still keep his own illusion of success through writing. One way of marking that distinction—and we see this in this very first line—is in the development of what will come to be Flaubert’s signature style of phrases separated by commas. Yet the first seed of the failure of that style to present (or the first success of the eventual livre sur rien, which amounts to the same thing) is contained in the zeugma of that phrase in which he yokes a young man’s heart and a diploma grammatically but not semantically; it is

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the first step toward the follies and failures of description that will mark all his subsequent work. Flaubert sets up his characters by insisting on their isolation, and in so doing, he manages to predict that they will not form successful relations, social bonds, happy marriages, or enduring relations. Already he does so early on in this first version of L’E´ducation sentimentale: ‘‘He thought as well of those three young men, his oldest friends, with whom he used to play cops and robbers: one had become a sailor, the second had died in Africa, the third was already married; all three were dead for him.’’12 The developing rhetoric increases the ways in which social structures are broken down by language. Thus, in this quick description, a parallel is made between loss to what might be called a homosocial order (the navy), loss from death, and loss to marriage. So even the young Flaubert has already found ways to use detail to kill progress, order, and the reproduction necessary to verisimilitude. And it is a gesture he will repeat in Madame Bovary, in a passing comment on Madame Rouault’s first pregnancy: the Rouaults’ son ‘‘would be thirty,13 but by Madame Bovary, he will generally take other paths to failure. In this early version of L’E´ducation sentimentale, however, no attempt is made to provide a means by which a social bond can be constructed. And even the basic plot mechanisms reinforce that message: there is no valid social bond: marriage, friendship, shared interests, and concubinage are all mere accidents of association. No human bond can form and it is only the retrospectively viewed one, understood through the false consciousness of nostalgia, that is perceived as being solid. And what bond there is cannot last: ‘‘Their passion, which had fermented for a long time, had begun to sour, as old wines do.’’14 Additionally, Flaubert does something here that he will intermittently do in the works that follow, which is to reflect directly on what writing might mean, and how it might succeed or fail. In Madame Bovary and in Bouvard et Pe´cuchet, there will be scattered references to the way in which writing does fail: being or becoming part of the doxa, misrepresenting (or even just representing), and setting up false knowledge, romantic cliche´s, or false hopes. And such a situation is also present in this early novel: ‘‘Henry lent books to Madame E´milie—poems, some novels. She read them secretly, at night in bed, and she returned them to him with thousands of scratches at the delicate parts.’’15 Literature fails through its success: it fails to be pure literature, in the sense that Flaubert envisions it, to the extent that it succeeds in inspiring romantic notions, a romanticism to which Flaubert is completely antipathetic. Elsewhere in this novel, Flaubert

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already predicts the nihilism and pessimism of Bouvard et Pe´cuchet: ‘‘The ladies said nothing or spoke of literature, which is the same thing.’’16 And in fact, the mature works are replete with illustrations of failure, as the author spends much time inscribing failure for his characters and constantly paring his writing so that more and more, it too, in moving away from the object, inscribes both its own self-sufficiency and its total incapacity. With the exception of Bouvard et Pe´cuchet and the Dictionnaire des ide´es rec¸ues, functioning as meta-texts, Madame Bovary is the work most consistently dedicated to failure, in part because it is an unmarked text when compared to the others. As far as the other narratives of this period are concerned, all but two are marked by a willful movement away from the reality of the nineteenthcentury: they are set in other times and locations, and, even if Salammboˆ is the most extreme, Flaubert manipulates text to bend it without much consideration for verisimilitude, but rather with an eye only to textual consistency within the individual work and with source material, though not with any ‘‘real’’ world. The remaining two works, L’E´ducation sentimentale and ‘‘Un Cœur simple,’’ occur in a world in which verisimilitude must be operative. As a Bildungsroman set in Paris, and therefore, as a revision of Balzac’s Illusions perdues, L’E´ducation sentimentale can set up failure without any justification necessary. And ‘‘Un Cœur simple’’ will be the streamlined, compact, and ironic version of Madame Bovary. Madame Bovary is not marked by any direct or immediate Parisianism, the defeat or success of the protagonist not being part of the initial set of expectations in a novel set in the provinces, whereas this set of expectations is always there in a Paris novel. So Madame Bovary is all the more radical in its mise-en-sce`ne precisely because it sets failure against a neutral background. The beginning pages of the novel show the first examples of Flaubert’s mature inscription of a movement toward decline and chaos, even as Flaubert is only initially presenting his character of Charles Bovary. Meaning and sense only seem to happen. Charles’ initial entrance and subsequent dysphasia are an interruption in the order of things; if the first word of the novel is ‘‘We’’ (Nous), that unity and community is broken by Charles, never to be reestablished. After that initial word, plenitude will exist only nostalgically in the past. Thus, it is only after the death of his first wife, following a rather pathetic and melodramatic bad marriage, that Charles can reflect: ‘‘She had loved him after all.’’17 Flaubert ups the stakes by bringing disorder to his text through the imposition of the arbitrary and through an imposed, false logic. Jean Ricardou has analyzed the famous description of Charles’ cap and has shown how

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Flaubert’s organization of physical space depends on the imposition of a temporal order through the use of adverbs and related semantic fields.18 Ricardou demonstrates that Flaubert fakes the construction of the cap through the artifice of language and that therefore he fails to present the object by virtue of his success in not presenting anything or in presenting nothing. Moreover, the parts of the famous cap are both arbitrary and interchangeable; there is no consequence at all to any specific detail about the cap. This is the first major example of the ways in which the arbitrary will begin to take over in Flaubert’s writing. As Jonathan Culler amply demonstrates, there is no coherence, no order, and no ‘‘orchestration’’ to Flaubert’s descriptions: one detail can substitute for another without a problem, and all of them, taken as some fictional whole, illustrate nothing.19 Beyond that, as Lesli Hill states, ‘‘stupidity, for Flaubert, is less a given content of discourse than a particular order of that discourse itself.’’ While streamlining his text, Flaubert is also making it more beˆte.20 Flaubert augments the breadth of the failure of his characters by preventing them from developing, regardless of what they undergo.21 Haplessness, inadequacy, and incapacity describe most of his characters, their ethos, and their views of the world. As Culler remarks, ‘‘Flaubert’s characters are poor reflectors in that they do not compose the world for us, do not organize it in ways that reveal new possibilities of feeling and perception.’’22 But the matter is more radical, revolutionary, and dire. Consider the consequences of the doltish Charles’ incapacity to learn: When he returned in the evening, Charles repeated one by one the sentences that she had spoken, as he tried to recall them, fill out their meanings, in order to complete the existence that she had lived before he knew her. But he could never see her in his thoughts differently from the way he first saw her or as he had just seen her.23

Charles cannot learn. Not only can he not serve as a reflector for us, but also he cannot even reflect for himself. He does not remember a perfect moment, and what he remembers is constructed by a very weak, imperfect consciousness of a limited mind. The same can be said for the eventual ball scene that Emma remembers retrospectively as she waxes nostalgic about its brilliance.24 In both cases, readers can see to what extent Flaubert successfully weakens his characters’ positions by reducing their memory not merely to some memory different from what we have witnessed, filtered through the narrator’s periodizing writing, but also to doxa: ‘‘Sometimes she thought that those were the most beautiful days of her life, her honeymoon,

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as they say.’’25 Emma and Charles may have had a tacky wedding cake, but her life is no better than a beˆtise or an ide´e rec¸ue, even if she does not even go to Italy to make the beˆtise of her honeymoon complete. But what really is going on in this novel? We have long ago given up the classic opposition between Balzac and Flaubert, with the latter having written a watershed work that breaks completely with previous narrative praxes.26 In that light, the novel is different from its exact contemporary Les Fleurs du mal, which does stage a total break with previous poetic praxis. But with Madame Bovary, even if Flaubert is closer to previous praxes than we once thought, the author does make a break in one way and no longer posits the milieu and therefore the relational as key to a verisimilar representation (or the lack thereof ), but attacks the possibility of verisimilitude in each sentence, with each stroke of the brush, and attacks on an ontological as well as an epistemological level. Long before Jules de Gaultier coined the expression ‘‘bovarysme’’ to describe a generalized psychological mechanism through which an individual or a collective misidentifies himself, herself, or itself by assuming it is an other, Gustave Flaubert, in a remark oft-quoted among the commonplaces of literary history, created a myth of mistaken identity when he said ‘‘I am Madame Bovary’’ (Madame Bovary, c’est moi).27 The famous sentence is subject to multiple interpretations and remains shrouded in an fundamental ambiguity. Two of the more obvious interpretations would go as follows. First, there was no woman or there were no women who served as the model for Emma. Rather, Flaubert, insisting on his own genius and on the universality of his psychological understanding, pulled her entirely from his own imagination. Let us briefly consider the possible objection, for this is merely an introduction to the problematics of identification in the novel, to wit, that if this interpretation is correct, the feminine is seen as derivative from some masculine equated with the universal. The implicit phallocentrism in that interpretation is disquieting to say the least, for it implies that there is no inherent identity to the feminine or that the social construction of the feminine depends on the agency and position of the masculine. Along those lines, Emma herself would never have an identity that was not determined by the men in her life—Monsieur Rouault, Charles, Rodolphe, and Le´on—or by the masculist society in which she finds the niche of her inherited subjectivity. This could naturally be seen as an indictment of that society in which the position of the woman or women is determined by men and phallocentrism, and weak men to boot.

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And yet the obverse of this interpretation is equally problematic, for it implies the necessity of a model, be it Flaubert himself or some woman or women. In the first version, Emma would be the drag version of the author, and implicitly his bad faith—what would come to be known as his bovarysme—would be translated into hers. In that interpretation, Flaubert’s own ambiguous relation to the cultural other is put into question: if Emma woefully misreads, is Flaubert’s own reading not potentially a misreading of a different hue? That is to say, if he will spend his career collecting beˆtises and ide´es rec¸ues, it is possible to see his own position of anti-beˆtise as being one of misreading as well: if for Barthes, famously, denotation is simply the last connotation, we might say that the ‘‘correct’’ reading of a cultural object is, for Flaubert, simply the last misreading. Moreover, implying that there might or might not have been a woman or women who served as models implies as well that art itself is necessarily derivative from reality, that it must take a mimetic and secondary position relative to a perceived reality, that representation is necessarily the weaker vessel. It implies that there can never be what Flaubert called a ‘‘book about nothing’’ and that verisimilitude is nothing more than the lie and artifice perceived by writers as different as Plato and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Another broad interpretation of the statement would derive Flaubert’s own identity from his creation. We should pause to remember that if this was in fact an oral statement, the author’s interlocutor could not hear whether ‘‘Madame Bovary’’ was italicized or not, that is, whether he was referring to the character or the novel. In either case, the author’s identity is a product of what he has created. This is no vatic impulse, but rather hard work and perspiration that produce the text which then, in an excess or surplus of meaning, produces Gustave Flaubert for who he really is. No longer the ‘‘family idiot’’—readers should remember that, coincidentally or not, Sartre stops right before Madame Bovary—he has become the author of Madame Bovary. Everything else in his existence is contingent and accidental; this alone is important. Far more radical a death of the author than that conceived of by Barthes in his well-known essay, this interpretation melts the individual’s very existence into the power of the novel, its aura, its fate, and its importance. Would Gustave Flaubert have been ‘‘Flaubert’’ had he not written Madame Bovary, had he not created Charles and Emma, or had he only been a hack writer? Arguably, he would not have been. His canonic existence as ‘‘Flaubert’’ is due entirely to what he wrote. Whatever interpretation we give to the remark, it would seem that in creating a seemingly Aristotelian equation of identity, Flaubert has summed

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up a contradictory misidentification, which we might then translate as ‘‘Madame Bovary does not equal Madame Bovary.’’ Of course, the obvious ramifications of that remark are self-evident, starting with the fact that there are three characters who are Madame Bovary—Charles’ mother, his first wife, and Emma—and continuing with the fact that the very institution of traditional heterosexual marriage that predicates the wife’s identity on that of her husband means that she is always improperly named and always misidentified through acts of convention. Society agrees that Emma is ‘‘Madame Bovary,’’ but the interpretative community is necessarily, radically, and fundamentally in error in its belief. On a level of absolute truth in nomination, there is no Madame Bovary per se. Thus even before Jules de Gaultier posited the kind of disidentification we associate in a general psychological sense with Emma’s romantic pinings as a universal form of behavior characteristic of both individuals and groups, Flaubert himself gave his readership or his auditors, in an illogical disequilibrium, one of the keys to understanding the novel. It is not that the author should always be believed about his or her work; inscribing an author’s interpretation as some truth both weakens the text itself, as well as its play of meanings, its ambiguities, its deconstructibility, and gives a role to an intentional fallacy. No, here Flaubert happens to be on the mark, precisely because he is not exactly talking about Madame Bovary or Madame Bovary. His outrageous insight depends on the impossibility of his interpreting the novel for us. In his psychological study that depends in part on a non-literary, philosophical-psychological analysis of Emma Bovary as well as other characters in Flaubert’s novels as a type and as a verisimilar construction for human nature in general, Jules de Gaultier defines bovarysme as ‘‘the power allocated to a man to conceive of himself other than he is.’’28 Bovarysme, at its heart, is a process of the creation of an illusion, whether the origins are internal, external, or a combination thereof. For Gaultier, the principal external force enabling the condition and therefore the epistemological validation of its universality is the fact that bovarysme is a product of ‘‘e´ducation,’’29 that combination of external forces of socialization, mores, and education that comes into contact with what is inherited to work with it or against it.30 This contact between heredity and e´ducation can itself be an argument for the creation of illusion in the real world, a condition that leads to what Gaultier, in a prescient move, will call the production of ‘‘the real,’’ that is to say, what is real for an individual: the phenomenal reality that he or she names, something at an entirely opposite pole from the Lacanian notion of the real. Yet

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arguably, the matter of disidentification in Madame Bovary can be better explained, as far as an analysis of the book itself is concerned, in more literary terms. An analysis of the twin processes of disidentification in the characters of Emma and Charles shows the ways in which misreading cultural objects (or not reading them at all) structures the disidentificatory mechanisms at work in the novel and deconstructs any possibilities of an Aristotelian process of identification. From the beginning to the end of the novel, Charles Bovary shows himself to be one of the most unteachable, not to say pedagogically recalcitrant characters in literature, at least insofar as knowledge and a love of learning are concerned. Now from the beginning we should state that it is not Charles’ lack of educability alone that creates this scenario, but a rote method of learning through memorization that impedes any singularity on his part. Charles enters into an already formed collective of students, breaking the uniformity of the chorus, and momentarily allowing an unknown first-person narrator to appear, one who will shortly disappear in favor of an impersonal third-person narrator, the figure of the realist author in the text. In the first lines however, starting with the famous incipit, ‘‘We were studying, when the principal came in, followed by a new student, dressed like a bourgeois, and a boy who was carrying a large desk,’’31 Flaubert manages to underline the difference between those who have mastered rote learning and the singular individual, soon to be metonymized by his singularly ragtag, heterogeneous casquette, who is new. Charles has not been socialized and cannot be part of that receptive, rote-learning collective chorus. Seemingly marked for distinction by his difference from the group and by the standard narrative praxis of introducing a future protagonist, Charles is soon integrated, albeit in somewhat of a skewed fashion, into the mediocrity of the surroundings. He distinguishes himself only by his lack of distinction; he takes no ironic distance from rote learning, preferring—if that word can be used to describe Charles Bovary—to treat the language of knowledge as something to be unquestioned, as an article of faith instead of as a figure of knowledge to be desired, internalized, and acted upon. At first, he seems to be in a state of religious rapture faced with knowledge: ‘‘We started to repeat the lessons. He listened with both ears, attentively, as if it were a sermon.’’32 And Flaubert is quick to point out that the realm of his mind that is at work is not so much his intellect but his conscience. If, in French, there is the possibility of confusing ‘‘consciousness’’ with ‘‘conscience,’’ there is certainly a vocabulary for distinguishing words relating to the intellect, words that do not appear here: ‘‘We saw him work earnestly, as he

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looked for each word in the dictionary and made things hard for himself.’’33 Diligent word-hunting in a dictionary is not a guarantee of system-formation in Charles’ head. Although we are at the beginning of the narrative, what Russian formalism called the sjuzhet, we are not at the beginning of the fable, for Flaubert provides his readers with a brief flashback about Charles’ previous educational experience. As any reader of the nineteenth-century novel in general and Balzac in particular knows, the flashback is a convenient device in the realist paradigm, for it provides background information to the reader that would otherwise seem to come as a set of stops within the exposition of the narrative, a narrative that might, without flashbacks, seem slavishly to follow a timeline in which subject and fable necessarily follow the same pace and the same model of exposition and explanation. Thus, to repeat the most best-known example already mentioned in the previous chapter, Balzac begins Le Pe`re Goriot with an exposition of the current life of the characters gathered in the Pension Vauquer, and it is only when the psychological and sociological mise-en-sce`ne is fully constructed, including Goriot’s marginalization, Euge`ne’s ambiguous future, and Vautrin’s mystery, that the narrator returns to a past in order to explain the present. Thus the flashback carries two distinct, albeit necessarily intertwined, functions within the developing paradigm of realist fiction. First, the function of the flashback is to serve as the logical backstop to the current situation. This involves, necessarily, a belief in and a positing of the verisimilar as fundamental to the creation of a psychological and social reality for characters. The past precedes the present, as Monsieur de La Palisse might have opined, but it is also part of the explanation for the present: there is no aspect of the current situation, whatever it is, that does not find its organic roots in a material, substantiated past. Even before the fact, there is thus a positivist aspect to the flashback that predicates the present, which is the future of the past, on the past. The second function is both informative and expectational: the reader of the realist narrative expects to be informed by the flashback in order better to understand the present. The logical, clean, unsullied, and rational reader believes in the knowledge and wants to believe in it, in a ‘‘willful suspension of disbelief ’’ that depends as well on the narrator’s capacity to perform a captatio benevolentiae. The reader of realist novels is a budding epistemologist with an amor scientiae second to none. Balzac’s paradigm will remain generally in effect throughout the various incarnations of realist praxis, even when Zola rejects psychology in favor of

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what we would currently call social construction, or even when, in a perverse novel such as Le Chaˆteau des Carpathes, Jules Verne spends almost the entire first half of the novel leaving the reader in the dark, only to turn midway to a flashback that does explain, at least on the surface, the perverse and vaguely paranoid universe into which he has thrust his superstitious characters. So even when the paradigm is perverted to various narrative ends, it is most often the case that the narrator will eventually provide the key to unlocking the ways in which logic and reason subtend the vagaries of the plot. That paradigm would have been operative in Madame Bovary, had Flaubert had faith in the powers of reason. But it is precisely because this author is constructing a novel in which reason will vie with and ultimately be overpowered by illogical behavior and disidentificatory mechanisms that there is an ambiguity—one of many, according to Culler’s reading of the author—in the relation of past to present and thus of the reader’s amor scientiae and of the fulfillment of his or her desire. The initial flashback to Charles’ pedagogical past serves several functions. First, it distinguishes Flaubert’s novel from those of his predecessors, especially Balzac, who relied both on a kind of logic and positivism to move the text along and on the presence of transcendental values to serve as universals. If, for Balzac, there is no ambiguity to the flashback, that is all there is for Flaubert. Second, even if that ambiguity is present, even if sequences in Flaubert are contingent not causal, Charles’ eventual path will seem to follow from these initial moments of the present and from the flashback. Yet his ultimate lack of interest in inquiry, in knowledge, and in progress—distinct from the politically motivated position of Homais, for which he eventually gets awarded the ‘‘medal of honor’’ (croix d’honneur)—will remain as contingent as anything else in the novel. Finally, the flashback for Charles structurally and formally predicts the first ‘‘set piece’’ of the novel, which is the flashback to Emma’s education, about which more below. How then has Charles been educated heretofore? Three moments all point to an antigenealogical position. There is a vacuity at the origin, a lack of possible continuation, and a foundational nullity for the disidentificatory mechanisms that will be at work in the development of his character, his lack of singular subjectivity, and his ultimate flatness and ignorance. The flashback will work differently for Emma than for him, so while he will certainly share in some aspects of her bovarysme (this will be clear in the second moment of the flashback) it will not at all be exactly the same. First,

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for Charles, there is what we might call a Rousseauistic origin counterbalanced by an insipid materiality, one cancelling out the other: ‘‘His mother fed him preserves; his father let him run around barefoot and, playing the philosopher, even said that he could go around naked, like the children of animals.’’34 Inspired by Rousseau’s pedagogical approach to letting the child run unfettered by the shackles of civilization, Monsieur Bovary sees fit to have Charles run free; if this nostalgia for a false freedom, already seen as fictional in Rousseau’s discourses, long before L’E´mile, is itself a fiction, it cannot be a foundational moment for Charles, who would need solidity and socialization for it to be the origin of a future event, a future commitment to self and to knowledge. And there is clearly a disjunction between the behavior of the two parents: if the father espouses Rousseau’s pedagogical philosophy, the mother’s position is antithetical: she spoon-feeds Charles ‘‘confitures,’’ not only sweet preserves, jams, and jellies, but something that is anything but natural: they are ‘‘confections.’’ The preserves counteract the wild streak and vice versa; Charles is left in the no man’s land between instinct and learning or between nature and culture, in which he shares the ‘‘beˆte’’ nature of the animal with the ‘‘infans’’—the speechless, as Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard and Christopher Fynsk have put it—of the spoon-fed child. Not only will neither position provide the groundwork for a future education and identification, but they will also, acting in concert, prevent any possibility for such a future from being introduced. From the beginning, Charles is in an epistemological double bind, unable to learn, live, or be anything but a dolt in a bizarre, motley, rag-tag cap, figure of the epistemological mosaic in which he will be nothing more than grout. The second moment is bovaryesque in nature and Flaubert is perhaps intentionally creating a psychological possibility for Charles: he will be receptive to Emma’s behavior and will be taken in by her, precisely because he too is bovaryesque or at least has a kernel of bovarysme in him: Charles’ mother ‘‘taught him to read and even taught him to sing two or three little romances on a piano she had.’’35 As any reader of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Mots knows, the moment at which one learns to read is foundational, and this is the case even for characters written by the idiot de la famille. The moment of origin at which one begins actualizing one’s amor scientiae through written language, which is also the moment at which memory both begins to fail (according to Plato’s Socrates) and to gel in a logical ordered form, is here subjected to the same sweetness already associated with Madame Bovary senior, at least insofar as her young son is concerned. If the piano is itself the mark of petit bourgeois respectability and therefore the mark of stasis and

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convention as opposed to progress and learning, the romances are stereotypically nostalgic little works that think about the perfection of love, often insipidly. Charles’ initial inscription of exogamous love is not only not a realistic one but also an impossible position on which to base a progressive coming to self necessary for Charles to become an adult. Flaubert also enacts the consequences of misreading. All readers remember the famous chapter—Chapter 6 of the first part of the novel—that Flaubert devotes to Emma’s education in the convent. Rather than learn the meaning of history or appreciate the literary value of a novel, Emma retains cliche´d images from which she creates her own personal museum of details that combine in no real constellation of meanings. Rather, her images are screens onto which she can graft her desires, wishes, and emotions; she can create received meaning out of her reading, by turning, for example, a heroine into a ‘‘heroine,’’ the perfect image of an idealized and melodramatically rewritten figure. Emma therefore fails to learn a lesson from her reading. Beyond that, however, is what the reader paradoxically learns about reading: reading does not have consequences insofar as content education is concerned. Finally, in this initial flashback, we are treated to the ultimate nonpedagogical moment in which teaching itself, subject to Flaubert’s derision, prepares Charles for the lack of progress to come. Even when taught, the lessons do not take, for formal reasons as well as for characterial ones: ‘‘When he was twelve, his mother was allowed to have him start to study. The priest was charged with this. But the lessons were so short and so badly followed, that they weren’t of much use.’’36 The quotation speaks for itself: the teacher cannot teach—this is arguably a cliche´ about the ignorant country priest—and the student cannot learn. The impasse, seemingly foundational, still cannot be overcome. Charles’ singular lack of talent as a young student seems to predict his mediocrity in school and his translation of informational discourses into ones understood reverentially, as he might understand a mass in Latin when he did not know Latin (often the case in literature, as everyone knows), and it also seems to predict his future inanition as a medical student, his blatant stupidity as a doctor, and his blindness to his wife’s affairs, even after her death. But the fundamental, foundational ambiguity, not to say nihilism, does not guarantee a prediction: Charles’ future stupidity can simply be an erratic repetition, a chance occurrence, or some combination of both. Flaubert then, while limning a perfectly mediocre fool, does not give the reader the certitude or the comfort by which he

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or she can definitively identify Charles as such; the author removes our moral superiority by not allowing us to mark Charles for who he is. With that caveat in mind, we can certainly proceed to examine the ways in which Charles learns the noble profession of Aesculapius, Hippocrates, and Galen. Why start in the ancient world? Precisely because Flaubert does: ‘‘The course of study, which he read on the announcement, stunned him: courses in anatomy, pathology, physiology, pharmacy, chemistry, botany, clinical medicine, therapy, not even including hygiene or medical matters; these were all words whose etymology he did not know and that were like doors to sanctuaries filled with ghosts.’’37 Charles’ lack of knowledge is painfully and penetratingly far-reaching, and, as is often the case, Flaubert is the master of understatement. By focusing on Charles’ incomprehension relative to etymology, seemingly an easy thing to research, learn, or understand, Flaubert can leave the fields themselves even more impenetrable to his character’s lack of intelligence or desire for knowledge. Again, the possibility of knowledge is translated into religious terms, a religion of sacrosanct silence in front of whose doors the celebrant offers devotion but through which he cannot enter. There are no doors to knowledge for him; resolutely closed, they are barriers to any possible transmission of knowledge or any participation in an episteme other than that of the received knowledge with which the author will fill all his works: ‘‘He understood nothing; listen as he might, he didn’t get it.’’38 Failure, inanition, dumbness: a lack of linguistic skill, a figural illiteracy that dooms Charles to a life of mediocrity. And the twist in the plot is anything but that, for it is a totally predictable event: ‘‘Thanks to this prep work, he completely failed his exam to be a medical officer.’’39 For the supposedly learned Charles, the country doctor, not reading is the same as reading, as he manages never to cut the pages of his medical dictionary. If Flaubert is telling the reader that the author’s writing will have no consequence, that the act of reading or not reading will have no effect, he has succeeded in communicating his failure, our failure, and the failure of language. It is a kind of Cretan paradox or double bind: Flaubert successfully communicates that the author fails to communicate, as Christopher Prendergast has shown.40 After this, we shall be endlessly in that paradox, in which the only success is failure. And yet if Charles’ failure to pass his exam is somehow predictable, it is what ensues as a consequence that provides the real indication of a disconnect between language and knowledge, between signifier and signified, and between episteme and referents. It is as if, even when given access to an epistemological database (to use an anachronistic

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term), Charles can never quite identify what it contains, means, and does. A reversal of interiority and exteriority negates any possibility of Charles Bovary discovering who he is or becoming who he will be: ‘‘Charles got back to work and, without interruption, prepared the subjects of his test, for which he memorized all the questions ahead of time.’’41 When in doubt, Charles returns to the catechistic, rote form of learning, as he becomes the first incarnation of what Julian Barnes so aptly calls ‘‘Flaubert’s parrot,’’ in reference to ‘‘Un Cœur simple.’’42 Charles’ psittacism is a sign of his not being able to assume the position of the sujet suppose´ savoir, the subject who is constructed by the passive swallowing of a variety of discourses, all of which are received knowledge of one sort or another. In sum, from the very beginning of the novel, the author develops a paradigm in which Charles Bovary is denied any possibility of attaining and internalizing knowledge, a negation that pertains both to knowledge of the world and knowledge about himself. Disengaged from himself and from his profession, his only recourse is reversion to an act of faith, albeit in a godless universe, in which accession is not to knowledge, but to the mouthed, empty signifiers of a rehearsed, secular catechism. If there is any relation to knowledge in Charles’ life, it is as an apposition or a prop. The latter word seems particularly appropriate here as it conjoins theatricality with the Freudian notion of Anlehnung. In the Freudian model, a desire of one sort or another ‘‘props’’ itself on a primary drive or instinct, thereby leaning on it; the primary drive serves to have a bolstering effect without which the desire might otherwise be evanescent or go into free-fall. The theatricality here can translate into a reversal. Whereas in the Freudian model, the desire of the subject leans on the primary instinct, here it is Charles’ ignorance—that which is internal to him—that leans on an external, theatrical prop: ‘‘The volumes of the Dictionary of Medical Knowledge, uncut, but whose jackets had suffered in sale after sale, were almost alone in adorning the six shelves of the pine bookcase.’’43 Knowledge itself, untapped, gradually erodes, or the sign of it does, as Charles leans further on its objectification as an adornment for a theatricalized office for a country doctor. Unlike the casquette, which is described as new (albeit as outlandish), the books—old knowledge gradually getting older—recede as a useful device. While Flaubert is not at all buying into a progress narrative—witness the ironic ending in which the apostle of progress, Homais, receives the cross of honor—he is, here as elsewhere, grinding his characters down through a process of attrition and wear.

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We shall return to Charles later in this chapter, but for now we should recognize that the thesis at work for him is double. On the one hand, his blind inanition toward medicine, which will have obvious consequences in the plot—the reader should think of the blundered operation on Hippolyte’s foot—will serve metonymically to determine both his lack of understanding of himself and that of his marriage. Charles’ incapacity to learn, regardless of whether or not he has an amor scientiae, will prefigure his total incapacity for self-knowledge and will make of him yet another version of the lowest common episteme that is the mediocrity of the ide´es rec¸ues. Beyond that, Charles’ self-ignorance will provide the background against which Flaubert will set a different kind of characterial disidentification, that of Emma, whom he will place, initially, in seeming parallel with Charles, but once we read the flashback about her education, we will realize that there is a profoundly more radical process at work. The first introduction of the conjunction of Emma Rouault and knowledge is predicated on a continuity between Charles and Emma’s approaches to knowledge, to life, and especially to language—a false continuity to be sure, but one that will allow them to speak and seemingly to communicate with each other: ‘‘From the beginning of the season, she complained of feeling dizzy [e´tourdissements]; she wondered if saltwater baths would be useful; she began to speak of the convent, Charles of high school; sentences came to them.’’44 Emma’s symptoms—or at least her complaint, we cannot be sure—are stereotypical of what even the best nineteenth-century medicine would have considered ‘‘women’s problems.’’ Women’s bodies are unstable, figuring potentially an inchoate, potential, latent, or realized hysteria, and the instability associated with ‘‘e´tourdissements’’ simply reflects the potential lower displacement. In a sense, then, she is initially both a better and a worse doctor than her future husband: better because she has correctly diagnosed herself as a nineteenth-century woman; worse, because since she is a woman (in the Sartrean sense of bad faith), she must have a woman’s symptoms: again, as with Charles, these are external bits of a received episteme that she internalizes as her own, undoubtedly through a process of mimesis, though not of a singular object of desire.45 Yet within the same sentence Flaubert shifts gears by moving from his oft-used imperfect to the passe´ simple, with a string of three verbs: ‘‘demanda,’’ ‘‘se mit,’’ and ‘‘vinrent.’’ By its very nature, Emma’s question seeks an answer; it is an invitation to talk, a flattering or flirting invitation since she seems to be inviting him to show off his knowledge. But as we already know, Charles can do no more than show off his ignorance. And there is

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no answer to the question. The verb in the passe´ simple sits there unconnected to the next action or to the next speech act in which she prepares Charles and the reader for the flashback that is to come. Moving from an active verb that invites an answer, Flaubert’s narrative heads toward a reflexive verb through which he shows that she has effectively internalized another discourse. But the narrative does not stop there, as it moves from that reflexive position to one in which the speaking subjects are no longer subjects but objects of language; and it is a language that comes to them from elsewhere, not necessarily from their individual selves but from some generalized speaking discourse that interpellates them as mouthpieces for banality and platitudes. Yet we already recognize that her bovarysme, her disidentification from any singular subjectivity is in part blindness to the platitudinous nature of her own remarks, as vapid as Charles’ and as empty as any other received ideas. And this occurs, even as she, in contradistinction to her future husband, seems to have an amor scientiae: ‘‘And Emma sought to learn what people really meant in life by the words ‘happiness,’ ‘passion,’ and ‘intoxication,’ words that had seemed so beautiful to her in books.’’46 It is not at all surprising that the nineteenth century, devoted as it was to the idea of progress, espoused the somewhat Faustian motive of the pursuit of knowledge as a central figure of the roman d’apprentissage. Different characters learn in different ways: for Julien Sorel’s learning by gradually internalizing the language of the other (‘‘une langue qu’il euˆt comprise mais qu’il n’euˆt pu parler’’), there is Euge`ne de Rastignac’s learning through his errors and a more direct social mastery. Zola’s Pascal learns as his author does, by espousing a scientific research method of copious annotation. The list is endless. And of course, the path to knowledge and erudition—the latter always a suspicious category within literature—is not always without trouble, be it the ruin brought about by Balthazar Clae¨s in Balzac’s La Recherche de l’absolu, the figure of the scientist in a whole host of works from Frankenstein through L’E`ve future, or the sterile knowledge and social bankruptcy of Casaubon in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Yet one would be hard-pressed to find a character in nineteenth-century fiction who so willfully and carelessly misreads everything that comes into her hands as Emma Bovary. It is not that she merely illustrates the dangers of reading novels already described by Rousseau in the preface to La Nouvelle He´loı¨se, where the light morals often described in novels might be perceived to have a negative influence on the morality of real girls in the real world. For Rousseau, following a Platonic line, theater is dangerous because it lies and novels are dangerous because they are seductive, teaching girls to

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stray from marriage, to think about adultery, and to wallow in romantic (and Romantic) Sehnsucht. As Charles could never warm to the irony with which Balzac laces his moral lessons and as Charles is clearly reflecting the common wisdom of the medical world in which he somewhat vaguely participates, it will eventually be a question of forbidding Emma to read novels, dangerous devices that they are. But we are not there yet and we return to Emma’s education via the flashback. As one might imagine, Jules de Gaultier mentions Emma’s education but he does so strangely, as he seems to provide some potential wiggle-room in a scene that is so hermetically written as to be a huis-clos for the character: ‘‘It was not necessary that the convent education and romanticism act on Emma Bovary in the way one sees them act. In her place, others would have escaped the same influences or would have reacted completely differently against them.’’47 For Gaultier, there is no valid psychological reason for her to behave this way. But he winds up having to conclude that the need to see herself as other than she is constitutes ‘‘her true personality’’ and that this fact, in and of itself, is the determining factor.48 Still, we might seek to push beyond the psychological determinism of a complex that forces her to behave in certain ways, for that bovarysme cannot in fact predict the validity of a single detail. Though it is only appropriate, for cultural and historical reasons, for Emma to be educated in a convent, a locus marked for the bourgeoisie as a safe one for girls to learn in, one cannot help but notice that she is automatically put into structural parallel with Charles, whose first lessons came from the cure´. If his lessons are essentially too short and too badly followed to be of much use, Emma follows too attentively, gives her eyes to too many details, and becomes immersed in the text. Emma reads by focusing on a detail to the detriment of all to which it relates; she singles out some matter, gives it romantic ampleur, and elevates it to the position of an ideal. Emma is no Jacques Derrida or Naomi Schor, recognizing the importance or singularity of a seemingly accidental; she would be incapable of the unique insight that can be provided by certain details. Rather, absorbed by the text, Emma is interpellated by the typical, the picturesque, the exaggerated, the exotic, and the difference that is not a difference but an ideological reinscription of the same. Let us consider the famous opening passage about Paul et Virginie, the first paragraph of the chapter on Emma’s education: ‘‘She had read Paul et Virginie and had dreams of the little bamboo hut, the Negro, Domingo, the dog, Fide`le [Faithful], but especially of the sweet friendship of some good

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little brother who would go look for red fruit in trees taller than bell towers or who, running barefoot through the sand, would bring her a bird’s nest.’’49 Rousseauist in its idealism and in its protection of morality, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s novel certainly has a plot that at least at the beginning focuses on an idealistic, nonsensual, nonsexual, and nonthreatening fraternal relationship between its title characters. All seems peaceful: the happy Negroes serve their white masters or mistresses with devotion; the dog is faithful as dogs should be; a perfect little society reproduces all that is good and leaves behind all that is bad. Emma focuses on that beginning, on the utopian, albeit somewhat sensual, nature of life on the island, for the red fruit and the barefootedness imply a sensual immediacy. And yet any reader would hasten to notice that there is a de´calage here: the adolescent Emma focuses on the young Virginie before the onset of puberty, before Pierre starts to read novels about the wicked ways of the world, and before, most notably, Virginie’s untimely death by drowning, a death provoked by an excess of modesty. If the author tries to create a world in which the good is idealized, he also seems to be saying that a touch of worldliness might save one from death—the word is Flaubert’s, in a hint at discours indirect libre. So it is not only what Emma reads and remembers but also what she forgets: ideally at the age where she might sympathetically identify with the unfortunate heroine or take a measure of what the latter’s worldly education might lead to, she refuses to go beyond the idealized position that frames the bit of narrative as if it were a tableau, a frieze, or a diorama.50 Emma’s mind reduces the dynamic to an idealized detail from which she can extract an eternal value, unchanging, timeless, with which to people her own ahistorical version of history and art. And so it is with the next example: a typical, even stereotypical vision used on painted plates that ‘‘represented the story of Mademoiselle de La Vallie`re,’’51 although the words accompanying the illustrations have been scratched by knives. Though this example does not as boldly ignore sexuality as the first example does, Flaubert manages to have Emma tiptoe around it: ‘‘The legendary explanations . . . all glorified religion, tenderness of heart, and Court ritual.’’52 What she does not seem to need to recall are the fact that Mademoiselle de La Vallie`re was the mistress of Louis XIV to whom she bore four children. If the explanations all glorified religion, it is safe to say that they focus on her life after she entered the convent. Retaining what she will of the story, Emma therefore can universalize the signifieds of ‘‘devotion’’ and ‘‘self-sacrifice,’’ for example, without entering what the consequences of the ‘‘tenderness of heart’’ might entail or what ‘‘Court ritual’’ might hide as encrypted signifieds.

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Thus we can begin to understand the inscription of matters of identity relative to bovarysme as a complete disjunction between parts of a sign system, power system, and representational model. Isolating one romantic feature or another, one larger-than-life aspect to an activity, Emma perverts the historicity, the function, and the context of each cultural element. And by that, I do not mean that Emma is a deconstructer avant la lettre, but rather that the element upon which she seizes is not only often not essential, but is just as often merely a figure that is tangential to the event or institution, not to say a complete disfiguring of the everyday function of the institution. Sin-free, at least for the moment, she invents ‘‘little sins’’ (petits pe´che´s)53 in order to stay longer in the confessional, to distinguish herself from her everyday life, and not to be Emma Rouault. Her whole conception of Christianity is based on a kind of attachment to martyrdom, pain, and suffering instead of on a post-Marianist intercession or a post-Reformation view of salvation.54 This is not to say that such visions of religion are wrong. Far from it. But her vision forms part of a pattern: her concept of Christianity relates to her inscription of Madamoiselle de La Vallie`re, only to be mutated into a kind of perpetual adoration, whether of the sacred heart or of the ‘‘celestial lover’’ and ‘‘eternal marriage.’’ Things are never of this world but always of an imaginary historical or eternal one. What Flaubert does beyond the initial bad faith of Emma’s misreadings of cultural phenomena is to translate her into bits and pieces of the discourse of the other. She does not simply see the fragment with which she identifies, she becomes it through its signifiers emptied of both their meaning and their context: she identifies with a discourse that she fills with her own idiosyncratic, decontextualized, and non-ideological meaning. The words of the other become her words, become her, as she is no longer distinguishable from that other discourse: She knew the romantic songs of the last century by heart and she sang them low while pushing her needle. She told stories, told you the news, did your errands in town, and secretly lent to the well-to-do some novel that she always had in the pockets of her apron, and from which the good young lady herself absorbed long chapters between her chores.55

Romantic longing and identification with the other are familiar, for example, to readers of Emily Bronte¨, in whose work Catherine identifies with Heathcliff. Here, however, in Flaubert’s hands, the process undergoes a mutation to focus fundamentally on the cultural object, the literary work, the

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story, or the stereotyped picture instead of another individual. Emma becomes the other text, as she figures herself as the vatic impulse of the other: ‘‘She let herself slip into Lamartinian wanderings, listened to harps on lakes and all the songs of dying swans.’’56 Hardly the same dying swan of Flaubert’s contemporary, Baudelaire, whose swan dies ‘‘with mad gestures’’ (avec ses gestes fous). What is remarkable is the way in which Charles’ and Emma’s reading styles, seemingly opposed to one another, actually amount to the same thing. Charles does not read and has a total disconnect with language. He cannot internalize anything but the received ideas and commonplaces that abound all around him and cannot learn from language: language ultimately has no real contents for him, no information, and nothing beyond the signifiers attached to commonplaces: ‘‘On the contrary, shouldn’t a man know everything . . . ? But that one learned nothing, knew nothing, wished for nothing.’’57 This vision of Charles is of course Emma’s own, one through which she distinguishes herself—in her mind at least—from him. Yet, when Emma reads too much, she enters into an abuse of language, filled with different kinds of stereotypical figures to be sure, but equally devoid of meaning. Nothing is more indicative of the disjunction than her relation to the dreamt-of El Dorado that is Paris. The purchase of a map of Paris and subscriptions to women’s magazines show a fascination and absorption in what amounts to a foreign discourse,58 an alien imagery in which idealized representational pictures such as those in the magazines and an iconic stylized representation of a city correspond neatly to Emma’s previous misreadings in school. Figures are separated from any possible correct reading and even if subscriptions to ladies’ magazines do serve in part their appropriate function, which is precisely the stimulation of desire for the stylish and the fashionable, there is nevertheless a complete disconnection between that stimulated desire and what she is capable of having and living. If she is gradually absorbed into that imagined world, it will be at the expense of her marriage and at a cost: precisely, the growing indebtedness to Lheureux on whom her bad faith will depend. And it is not for nothing that Paris itself takes on a gilt allure: ‘‘Paris, vaster than the Ocean, thus shimmered in Emma’s eyes in a ruby atmosphere.’’59 Essential then to the construction of the desired object is the possibility of imagining it being constructed differently than it is in reality. The object of desire is reworked by the thirst for knowledge, for that very specific solipsistic knowledge that is the ignorance fostered by bovarysme. Through a reconstruction of the imagined object as she would have it, Emma is able to

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forego any reality checks and any participation of the object in either a semiotic system or an economic one. The objects of her desire for knowledge then are both fungible and fantastic. It seems almost beside the point to underline this redoubled strangeness and it goes without saying that Emma invests her own desires in the objects she creates, in what she reads, and in fact in all of her activities. Yet the objects are literally objects of fantasy that she mentally invests with her desire to be other than what she is, other than who she is: ‘‘Carnal desire, the craving of money, and the melancholy of passion all were confused in the same suffering; and instead of diverting her thought, she got closer to it as she got overwrought by sadness and as she sought out any occasion for such thought.’’60 Nothing can be compartmentalized or fixed in place. The object of desire is a gap in which her longing and suffering can be invested but which can never be fulfilled. Since the objects are fungible as they participate in her mental world in an ever-rotating phantasmagoria, they are part of a larger system in which the projected desire can float from object to object. Aside from any mise-enabyme of the writer’s activity, the written text and its component parts occupy a primary position as the figure of the phantasmagoria. The gap of the written, its lack of presence to itself in a deep Derridean sense, is the ideal figure for Flaubert’s investment in creating Emma’s objects of knowledge, for they can never be anything but the mobile language of the ‘‘livre sur rien’’ that Flaubert is creating as a novel and within the novel for his character: Emma’s reading and writing are necessarily ‘‘sur rien’’ themselves, figures of the incapacity of fixing any object through language. Moreover, Emma’s misguided belief and ultimately that of the other characters in the novel is that written language can somehow fix an object and that it is not an illusion of that object, a locus in which the reader can invest a desire of sorts, if only the desire for verisimilitude. If we, as real readers, invest our desire for verisimilitude in the novelistic text and if Flaubert creates a rhetorical reader who reads according to the same protocol as we do, this protocol is ordered and logical. It is not by any stretch of the imagination wholly predictable that we arrive at this point, and the locus of figurality in general and irony in specific is in that unpredictability. And yet there is an order to our reading, a path determined by logic and the rules of representation. Furthermore, Flaubert does not hesitate to weaken his characters psychologically even more by having them fall into a trap of reading, which is also the trap of believing that there can be consequences. For Emma however, though writing is invested with her desire and with alchemical powers of transmutation, changing her in her own mind into gold, it does not have any order

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other than the formal one of instrumentality: ‘‘She wanted to learn Italian: she bought dictionaries, a grammar book, and a supply of white paper. She tried serious readings of history and philosophy.’’61 Italian is of course the language of love, opera and specifically Lucia, and honeymoons, if we are to believe the Dictionnaire des ide´es rec¸ues. So we understand why, in specific, Emma invests her desire in Italian. If Charles’ resolution to prevent Emma from reading novels is Rousseauist in inspiration, yet minimal in its effect,62 it is because Emma is so totally consumed by her reading and fantasies that she has dissolved into that world. She does not exist outside of the novels she reads; her individual identity melts into a vague alienated third-person: ‘‘She was the love interest of every novel, the heroine of every drama, the vague ‘‘she’’ of every volume of poetry.’’63 Her ego and her sense of self become completely other as she inserts herself into a world constructed entirely of desire that cannot be effectively channeled: ‘‘Then she recalled the heroines of books she had read and, in her memory, the lyric legion of those adulterous women began to sing with the voices of sisters who charmed her.’’64 Confusion reigns. Whereas Emma reads too quickly,65 Charles reads too slowly, if at all: as we have seen, he manifests a total lack of desire for the object of knowledge. If Homais—who reads correctly and methodically—hears about a new ‘‘method’’ for curing club feet,66 it is precisely the lack of a method and the absence of a path through the woods that lead Charles to botch the operation. Not only does he not read the way his wife would desire him to read, he also reads with a total lack of curiosity and a complete absence of desire. In a sense then, in not investing his desire in textuality, Charles winds up at a position relative to the truth of the text, scientific knowledge in this case, similar to Emma’s: neither is capable of engaging the written word for itself. And even when faced with Emma’s letters, Charles can do nothing but stare in incomprehension,67 in a willful blindness to the truth, albeit an ironic one, of her writing, a blindness that can be followed only by his premature death. While Emma dies of arsenic poisoning, Charles dies of pure, unadulterated stupidity. In all cases, however, even, one might argue, that of Homais because his reading is a pure psittacism of the doxa, reading fails. Flaubert’s characters fail even further because they are not allowed to read the writing on the wall, the message that says there is no message, or the writing that says nothing has ever been learned from reading. And they fail to recognize what we know now, which is that there is neither truth nor any essence to language:

84 Flaubert and Zola: Challenges to Verisimilitude From that moment on, her existence was nothing more than a pack of lies, where she wrapped her love, as if in veils, to hide it. It was a need, a mania, a pleasure, to the extent that, if she said she had been on the right side of the street the day before, one had to believe that she had been on the left.68

To round out the defeat of verisimilitude in Flaubert’s work, let us turn to some final considerations in the post-Bovary productions. In so doing, I am leaving to one side the historical novels and focusing on works that treat the contemporary. Flaubert often presents past events through a character’s nostalgic memories, such as in the last scene in the final version of L’E´ducation sentimentale, in which Fre´de´ric and Deslauriers remember a youthful adventure (but we have as little confidence in their opinions as we do in Madame Bovary), whereas in Madame Bovary, we were at the narrator’s side, so to speak. And we saw not perfection, but Flaubert’s construction of a narrative description for the sake of that narrative description. Emma is no more a retrospectively remembered bit of perfection than Charles’ cap would be were it mentioned again. The fancy ball is no greater than the descriptions that do not work coherently to illustrate a world. Flaubert creates a mise-en-abyme of the predicament of the reader. He enacts the futility of individual acts of writing coupled with the inscription of a doxa, most often of romantic love. Thus Henry: ‘‘The adorable stupidity of love! He went to bed only toward two o’clock in the morning, after having writing five impassioned pages to the love of his heart.’’69 In Madame Bovary, Le´on does not know how to write love letters,70 and Emma constantly and consistently takes every wrong turn she can possibly take. Having decided to prevent Emma from reading dangerous novels, Charles continues to muse in a discours indirect libre: ‘‘Wouldn’t one have the right to inform the police if the bookseller continued his profession of poisoner?’’71 Finally in a figure of meta-pedagogical failure, in Bouvard et Pe´cuchet, the failed pedagogy is itself a kind of writing, generalized to the sense of communication in an active sense, as opposed to the passive reception associated with reading. From the very beginning of the Flaubertian enterprise, descriptions are undermined by the impossibility of presenting objects and individuals all at once, as if in a photograph or a hologram. There is also an act of destruction and decline, generally kept in check until the last part of Madame Bovary, though hinted at all along the way and then given free rein both in Salammboˆ and L’E´ducation sentimentale. There is a hint in the early version of L’E´ducation sentimentale as well, as ‘‘his desk [is] marred with cuts and black with

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ink.’’72 This image of damage and abrasion resurfaces in the final version of the novel, where clothes are ‘‘shredded by rubbing against the desk.’’73 It is as if, in being devoted to creating perfectly rhythmic, balanced descriptions and in having eschewed the object itself, Flaubert feels compelled to introduce that damage in his descriptions. He knows full well that he will never succeed, for destruction, damage, and decline always have a measure of chance. Where will the crack, hole, or break be? How will things fall away exactly? Flaubert can never write this; we can never know. Flaubert introduces destruction as a way of marring his own text, and as Jean-Pierre Richard has shown, the more layers one strips away from Flaubertian description the more liquid the text becomes.74 It desolidifies to become aqueous and unpredictable. Thus does Flaubert introduce rot: as he writes of ‘‘the druggist’s fetuses, like packages of white tinder, rotted more and more in their muddy alcohol.’’75 The examples of this destruction are legion: Hippolyte’s botched operation followed by an infection that forces an amputation; Emma’s death from arsenic, liquefying her, defying the reader to maintain her as an object; the catoblepas at the end of the final version of the Tentation that once ate its own paws76 —a figure, according to Richard, that ‘‘dominates Flaubertian creation’’77—the various explosions in agriculture and anatomy in Bouvard et Pe´cuchet. Salammboˆ is rife with such scenes, of which the torture and death of Maˆtho is only the best known.78 But one could mention in the same breath any of the crowd scenes or the singularity of the decrepitude of Hamon’s body: [Hamon] had painted the ulcers of his face with makeup. But the gold powder from his hair fell on his shoulders, where it formed two brilliant patches and they seemed whitish, thin, and fuzzy like wool. Bandages, soaked in an oily perfume that was dripping on the tiles, covered his hands, and his illness had undoubtedly gotten considerably worse, for his eyes disappeared behind the creases of his eyelids. For him to see, he had to thrust his head back.79

From Emma’s death onward, Flaubert’s characters fail to exist. In her cogent analysis of L’E´ducation sentimentale, Michal Ginsburg points out the interchangeability of the characters in that novel, like the interchangeability of details already mentioned.80 It little matters who is in what scene, who says what to whom, or what happens. Flaubert does not fail at his workmanship; his vision of the world, getting ever darker as he goes on, insists that human relations are a failure, that they do not matter. By Bouvard et Pe´cuchet, the last turn of the gyre has occurred. As Ginsburg says, ‘‘But we

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know that Bouvard and Pe´cuchet do not fail all the time, and that the success they enjoy every now and then has precisely the same function in the narrative as their failure; success and failure have the same effect of prompting them to change their subject of study.’’81 I would go one step further: the success and the failure of words have no consequence. Decline and destruction mark every aspect of the structures of Bouvard et Pe´cuchet. In that novel, which, as Marina van Zuylen indicates, is marked by the ‘‘absence of a center,’’82 Flaubert moves beyond the uncertainty of Bovary and Salammboˆ. He goes beyond the obstinate irony of ‘‘Un Cœur simple’’ and L’E´ducation sentimentale and reaches a level of decline and insufficiency theretofore unheard of. Language and knowledge, while once in support of received ideas in the earlier works and translated into nostalgia in L’E´ducation sentimentale, are, in Flaubert’s last work, marks of a monstrous epistemology and a rhetoric of failure. On every page of Bouvard et Pe´cuchet, there is an implicit or explicit battle of words, a logomachy. On one side, one set of opinions; opposed to it, a seemingly equally valid set of opinions. There is no way to reconcile the opposing interpretations; no adequation or dialectic can move the hapless receivers of opinion to a felicitous conclusion. These logomachies are pyrrhic victories in which both sides lose. Consider the pithy summary of the French Revolution: ‘‘For some, the Revolution is a satanic event. Others proclaim it a sublime exception. The losers on each side, naturally, are martyrs.’’83 There is no reconciliation of opinions and there is thus a total failure to understand. Nothing can tip the balance because there is no objective position from which to assert, nor any from which to hypothesize and test. And if we think that having a total assessment of the situation will help determine the truth, we would be wrong, for the whole truth can never be had; the marks of absence and decomposition are endlessly present now. None of the truth can be had: ‘‘To judge [that era] fairly, one would have to have read every history book, every memoir, every newspaper, and every handwritten document, for an error could come from the smallest omission, one that would engender others ad infinitum. They gave up.’’84 Beyond the renunciation, which is after all an acceptance, submissive or not, of failure, there is a radical change from works like Madame Bovary and L’E´ducation sentimentale. For in those novels, there is the hope offered by nostalgia to recuperate the plenitude of the past. Even if the characters’ perspective on that past is different from the one offered the readers by the narrator, who thus puts an ironic distance between us and them, the characters have the possibility of turning away from their failure and toward the

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illusion of success and happiness. No such escape mechanism exists in Bouvard et Pe´cuchet: And they remembered the time that they were happy. . . . Nothing now would bring about such sweet hours as those that filled the distillery or literature. An abyss separated them from those things. Something irrevocable had happened.85

 No return is possible. The protagonists are condemned to exist in a failure they recognize from time to time. What is left in spinning out these lives but to pass along their lack of knowledge and become teachers? An assessment of Flaubert’s figures of failure shows an ever-widening gyre, which, starting from characters marked by a kind of romantic longing, eventually invades the entire corpus. Where Flaubert moves away from the irony and cynicism of someone like Balzac or his total pessimism outstrips the darkness of later writers like Dostoevsky, Kafka, and even Beckett is the way that failure creeps into the very writing itself. The success of Flaubert’s writing is in the fact that it attains total failure: there can be no hermeneutic code, there can be no interpretation, there can there be no successful evocation of an object in time and space. The more precise the descriptions seem to become, the more they are accidental and contingent. Values and meaning collapse at the level of the writing, as it begins to reproduce the collapse of meaning and values for the characters. In the end, there is no solution but to go on endlessly, working at doing nothing: ‘‘Literature. Occupation for the lazy’’ (Litte´rature. Occupation des oisifs).86 No author in recorded history will have worked harder than Gustave Flaubert to fail at his task.

Food for Thought: Le Ventre de Paris As is well known to all scholars of nineteenth-century French literature, one of the major ways in which Zola distinguishes himself from his predecessors is by establishing a so-called scientific method for his writing. In his polemical work, Le Roman experimental, Zola sets up the bases for his approach to producing the naturalist text. Without dwelling too long on this method, if only because the actual novels produced often stray from the rigid guidelines, I should briefly summarize the process. First of all, Zola bases his approach on his understanding of both the positivism of Auguste Comte and Hippolyte Taine and the experimental medical approach of Claude Bernard.

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Positivism allows him a predictability within the system. Given the mechanics of a system and an understanding of the state of being thereof, positivism allows for a prediction of any future state, as long as momentum and position can initially be calculated. This scientific and philosophical position allows Zola to eschew the unpredictability and the ambiguity of the psychological in favor of his own version of momentum as it relates to his concepts of genetics and event. Knowledge of what precedes the current state of events—knowledge of the genealogical tree of the Rougon-Macquart as well as deep knowledge both of the social structure in general and of a specific socioeconomic position in particular—allows Zola’s narrator to take a scientific approach to his task. But how does the author get knowledge of a specific socioeconomic position, be it mining in Germinal, railroads in La Beˆte humaine, or food markets in Le Ventre de Paris? Following the models offered by the experimental medicine of Claude Bernard and others, Zola views his world as a laboratory in which intimate knowledge can be gained objectively without any subjective prejudices on the part of the investigator, scientist, or budding novelist. Now whether or not this possibility of completely desubjectivized writing is possible is ultimately beside the point. Zola seems to believe that through the development of intimate knowledge of the discourses and communicational and exchange models of a specific universe, he can represent that universe to his readers. The question essentially is a double one, which is not grounded in the possibility of this representation, for let us assume for the sake of argument that this representation is possible, even though it is ostensibly not. The first way of looking at the question is to ask whether the act of representation through this scientific method itself interferes with the production of verisimilar narrative. By raising this point, I am suggesting that it is possible that the very act of representing in a seemingly verisimilar fashion might itself be considered to be an antimimetic and an antirepresentational moment. This may occur precisely because of Zola’s need for an understanding of the whole, as if somehow he were the bearer of the standard of the omniscient narrator through a scientific approach rather than one based on eternal universals, as Balzac’s is. We cannot ascribe to Zola a totalized understanding of psychology or a complete devotion to style, either or both of which might be at loggerheads with a concept of verisimilitude that includes the subjective position. After all, one individual’s perception of the truth—that is, of a verisimilar position that is believable as the adequation of the truth—might be inflected by one’s own subjectivity.

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The other way of looking at the question is set in counterpoint to the first: Does the very method that Zola uses or purports to use interfere itself with the representation of the truth? In other words, could his approach that necessitates explanation and the organization of the random and chaotic itself be an impediment to the exposition of verisimilitude? Obviously, this is not a yes-or-no question, but we already know from various studies of ekphrasis, for example, that the act of stopping an ongoing narrative in order to describe something, an act that has a myriad of functions, could itself skew the presentation of the situation. As I have shown elsewhere, Balzac uses ekphrasis to set a mood, give the background, determine the situation in which he sets his characters. And as Jean Ricardou demonstrated long ago with the example of Charles Bovary’s casquette, the necessity of distributing the description over space and time is an artifice that essentially interferes with the object presenting itself as a whole in a verisimilar space. Yet ekphrasis is only one example among many that challenge verisimilitude through narrative process. Before looking at the first of Zola’s novels I shall analyze here, I should like to consider three of these narrative processes, albeit in passing: one each of the levels of the object, the signified, and the signifier. At the level of the object, one should consider that certain objects may not easily lend themselves to representation. As Michel Serres has shown in his studies of Lucretius and Zola and as Naomi Segal has so thoroughly shown in her study of Gidean hydraulics, that which is not solid is not easily represented;87 authors sometimes need to impose a system in order for the objects to be coherently understood by the reader. At the level of the signified, one need only consider the meaning of words or objects in the discourse of a nonhegemonic or nondominant group that does not buy into the dominant discourses of sex, race, gender, identity, or the like. Finally, one should consider that any trope or rhetorical figure, as Paul de Man has shown, has a destabilizing effect, and as Jacques Derrida has shown in almost every single work, a signifier or pattern of signifiers can point to a deconstruction of patterns of dominance and meaning. Arguably the first novel in the Rougon-Macquart series to move away from a strictly political context, Le Ventre de Paris uses the political as a motivating force while trying to establish a socioeconomic context against that position. More central to our concerns here, this novel establishes an approach to its subject matter as naturalist text through orchestrating famous set pieces and as a means for the transmission of knowledge. As befits a novel that breaks out of the mold of the purely political, Le Ventre de Paris casts that background into two underlying categories that will move the text

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along both in harmony and dissonance with the development of the naturalist aesthetic in the work. First, the political is cast into a historical mode and the novel begins with memories of historical events and inscribes them into a temporalized background against which any event must be set. There are memories of an insurrection, an imprisonment, and ultimately a flight from Devil’s Island back to the French mainland. The establishment of Florent’s individual existence against a real history means that the individual is set against a collective, shared memory that is personalized in each individual case at the same time. But that individual existence—and this will become capital for the text—is also set against an evolving set of mercantile and artisanal practices that do not necessarily follow the same time line as the historical events but that also do not follow the same time line as an individual existence, or, a fortiori, as that of the text that purports to represent these sets of knowledge, which may or may not be mutually exclusive. That is to say, historical, comestible, and educational paradigms may be mutually contradictory, and the insertion of the character into one of them may in fact interfere with the positivist model necessary for Zola’s depiction of the truth through the representation of the verisimilar. How does one make a good blood pudding (boudin) or prepare a proper breaded cutlet? What specific spices and in what quantity should be added to sausage meat in order to make it savory? These inscriptions, part of a specialized yet collective memory, are essentially stockpiled here and there in a way that makes them locally transmittable regardless of the general scenario. In a sense this means that the transmission of knowledge can happen in spite of a political and historical situation and because of a commitment to a sense of self that is integrally related to the local. There is no better sense of this position than as embodied in the character of Lisa Quenu who anchors the position of the individual through a total instrumentality of the self, a complete illustration of Zola’s attitude toward the philosophical—and hence, scientific, in the author’s mind—predictability of positivism: ‘‘Lisa’s ideas were that everyone had to work in order to eat, that everyone was in charge of his or her own happiness, that one did harm in encouraging laziness, and finally, that if there are unhappy people, too bad for the ne’er-dowells.’’88 Thus in this model, which will prove ultimately to be political as well, excess can be arranged and everything brought back to order: the clean cut represents the order of the world, but it is precisely that lack of excess and disorder that makes the representation unverisimilar. In Lisa’s model, even the ne’er-do-wells can be reclassified and brought back from their egregious positions; one introduces order and makes ‘‘oneself a bed of

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bliss.’’89 There is nothing simpler to do: as the novel continues, Lisa will attempt to return everything to a state of order, and finally, to do so by expelling Florent, who is, in a strict Girardian sense, the scapegoat of a corrupt and illegitimate state. Yet at the same time, if Florent is the pure scapegoat on the level of plot—even though he is not innocent in a political sense, he is the victim of the state—he is not that at all on an epistemological level. As we shall see later in this chapter, he is truly dangerous, as the transmitter of knowledge and as the purveyor of a position independent from the instrumental one defined by Lisa. And as such, he threatens the stability not only of the political order, but also of the modes of representation that Zola is marshaling to his own ends. In this part of the chapter then, I shall look at the various conflicts in representation involved in Zola’s e´talage both of provisions and knowledge against the instrumentality of the plot, the state, and history. And in so doing, I shall reproblematize the novel in a way that goes beyond what one might see as the classic opposition in interpretations: an interpretation that focuses on the set pieces as simple tours de force versus one that, while taking the plot into account as the central mechanism of the novel, concentrates on the political. As Henri Guillemin maintains, Le Ventre de Paris is truly a political novel, just like almost all of Zola’s other novels; yet at the same time, the real reader, as distinct from the implied narratee, may tend to remember the synaesthetic symphonies of the detailed descriptions of the foodstuffs even more than the political events, whose representation compete, in a certain sense, with the reader’s own knowledge of history and politics. Politics is the raison d’eˆtre of the novel while not being the motivating force. As I have already indicated, Le Ventre de Paris is really the first novel in the series in which we see the naturalist aesthetic at work, even if—and this is a subjective opinion rather than a provable or even demonstrable assertion—the full-blown and well-mastered aesthetic does not dominate Zola’s writing until L’Assommoir. That work will succeed on a complete level in distinction to the fragmentary successes of Le Ventre de Paris, which relies on the historical and political to carry it through. For in L’Assommoir, and even more in novels such as Nana, Au Bonheur des dames, Germinal, and La Beˆte humaine, it is clear, unlike in this more instrumental novel, that excess cannot be ordered. Verisimilitude will happen despite the aesthetic, the impossibility of true representation, and the preparatory dossiers so dear to the author and many of his critics who fall into naive intentional fallacies. Excess is something more and different from mere abundance and repetition. In Le

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Ventre de Paris, however, there is an interchangeability of discourses: the police files, for example, are a repetition of what we have read and of what Lisa would have said; they are a repetition of the novel. Discourses here are still interchangeable and everything can be brought back to a logical, textual order. Everything except the still lifes of the food and the strange transmission of knowledge from Florent to his pupil. It is this pedagogical transmission in which the system is not brought back to order and in which excess is translated, changed, multiplied, and mutated. This transmission is neither predictable according to the laws of order that apply to the still lifes nor those that apply to the political and historical model. And Florent himself is a case in point, proof that the model of knowledge works only when it does not function correctly. Once upon a time, Florent himself attended school and took classes, ostensibly to reconfirm the order of instrumentality and to reassert his position of subjection relative to the model of dominance offered both by the state and by the positivist aesthetic. And yet he did not learn to be a good citizen as the state defined it, nor did he willfully become a productive member of society. For separate and apart from the officially transmitted model, there is a revolutionary discourse of unknown origins that leads him not toward the mode of proper representation but rather into the abjected position of total rejection on Devil’s Island. This first education is repeated in a second one, a transmission of knowledge—but who knows in what combination?—from Florent to Muche, the wild child, son of ‘‘the beautiful Norman woman’’ (la belle Normande), a fishmonger who will be the rival of ‘‘beautiful Lisa’’ (la belle Lisa), who runs the delicatessen [charcuterie]. Nothing succeeds like excess: what winds up being interesting here in the detour of realism is precisely that which goes beyond the method, that which is excessive or ‘‘strange,’’ to use Zola’s word.90 So we recognize that excess and incompletion are somehow in the same category, too much or too little being the challenge to the adequation between sign and thing and between the act of representation and the illusion of verisimilitude. In Le Ventre de Paris, these insufficiencies and excesses tend to take place in three broadly defined categories, heterogeneous ones to be sure, connected to one another not by any inherent semantic or epistemological fields, but by literarity and the literary processes to which the raw material is subjected. These categories of knowledge and information are recipes, and in particular, those for the various products sold in the delicatessen; the displays of food; and the manifestations of knowledge as the basis for Muche’s education. Each of these semiotic fields depends on one or

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more fields of knowledge. Recipes and the production of delicacies depend on an artisanal knowledge coupled with savoir-faire and good taste, this last being necessarily approximate and subjective yet the sine qua non for having a good product. Foodstuffs depend on the knowledge produced and gathered within the oldest science known to the human race, agriculture, the one that defines all others to come, and one that is dependent in part on an economy that contains both fixed and moving parts. Finally, teaching or pedagogy depends on a variety of knowledge systems; it is a transmission through language of what was, what happened, what was discovered, what has been learned, and what might be predicted. Pedagogy becomes a path toward the future and thus toward something that cannot yet be represented, something that falls outside of the preterite of narrative fiction.91 We see a double movement at work in all three cases. There is a system of fixed, permanent (or semipermanent) knowledge that serves as an economy or shorthand figure from the reproduction of the usual. Yet at any given moment, things may not fit into the system or may escape from it or change it: bad weather, boiling water, rancid butter, or even a coup d’e´tat. But Zola goes further and introduces, in the heart of the identical, an alterity and subjectivity that cannot be accounted for by the system: Lisa’s palate, recipes from the South of France, or a ‘‘strange interest’’ that Florent has for Muche, not to mention, at least for the moment, the strangeness as such of this wild child. As one might expect, the first display is from the plant world, sign of the agriculture that is foundational and sign too of the sjuzet of the novel, which begins with the arrival at Les Halles of farmers bringing their produce to market. The novel joins civilization at its beginnings; ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, and all seems to be well with the world. Nature, origins, the beginning, naturalezza, all seem to be in consort and in concert. They are normative and normal and quickly found the natural order of culture, the economic order: vegetables, quickly given value, sold, traded, or stolen, found this primary economy based on nature and perceived as being natural. Yet a trouble-maker arrives in this smoothly flowing economy: Florent, whose floral first name necessarily redefines the seemingly stable economy with the introduction of a sign that is decidedly far from the nature it purports to represent. And this distance helps denature nature. Having come from Cayenne (after Devil’s Island), Florent is a hot pepper that bites, burns, and rips the guts out of the belly of Paris. But it is not at all by chance that Florent comes from so far away and comes precisely from that place, one that cannot be harmonized with a simple economy, though clearly it is part

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of a more complicated agrarian economy that feeds on humans as well to make itself work: Devil’s Island and Cayenne are signs of a colonial economy that is far more extensive than the local economy that the text would have us believe is self-sufficient, far more brutal, violent, and deadly as well. So, in the end, it is not a local farmer’s cart that will cripple Florent, but rather the colonial economy and the figures of empire and imperialism that will do so: slave ships, slavery, forced uprooting, and renomadization of the other in order that the bourgeois individual may have a clean meal, free of detritus. Florent becomes the human figure of this bloody economic system and, as the representative synecdoche of the system, his position as a verisimilar character is compromised. His position marks him as doubly displaced, enslaved, and nomadized by the economic, political, and social systems. Zola manages to introduce this multiple destabilization—of the system, of the local, and of the character—into the first still life of the novel. Seemingly just a presentation of the realm of the vegetal, the display is literally and figuratively an aesthetic version of itself, with the bunches, packages, and groupings of the individual vegetables in evidence: vegetables are never themselves, but are always organized by culture. Yet if we consider that vegetables are present at that moment in order eventually to be eaten and thus to disappear, we recognize that Zola offers the reader what we might term two ‘‘accidental’’ qualities (in the Aristotelian sense) for the vegetables that have nothing to do with his scientific method or with his means of representation of the vegetables. The first is what has been called the symphony of colors. Zola offers his readers a panoply of hues and a rainbow of colors that vibrate in their minds, but given the nature of color according to Wittgenstein, this celebration of hues detracts from the essential qualities of the vegetables and diverts readers from the vegetables’ utilitarian value and use in an economy that is not the cleanest. Zola aestheticizes the economy, as he hides the brutality of the system behind a rainbow decor. In fact, from the beginning to the end of the novel, through this series of still lifes, and especially in the hallucinatory Wagnerian opera of cheeses, Zola will steadfastly use techniques like this colorization, techniques that hide both the essence and the violence and that will by their very nature provoke leaks, deficiencies, and excesses in the system. In a move toward representation, Zola shows the surface while hiding the deep meaning necessary to a verisimilitude that goes beyond Wiederspiegelung.

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The second technique to which Zola resorts is the extensive use of synaesthesia, a complicated aesthetic figure that associates elements from one artistic order with those from another one. Here, as elsewhere, Zola speaks of the musical notes and sonorities of the vegetables. On the one hand, the synaesthesia could be considered nothing more than a catachresis, for as in the case of perfume, for example, it is normal to speak of high notes and low notes; much the same can be said for vocabulary relating to wines. On the other hand, the synaesthetic element, if not the catachresis as such, seems to have no place in a supposedly scientific observation that purports to describe a fixed panorama into which no poetic devices should theoretically enter. Synaesthesia destabilizes descriptions by turning them into figures of the poetic and denaturing them through moving us from the representational to the figurally semiotic or to what might be aligned with the connotative in Barthes’s vocabulary. And this is capital, for if nature is considered to be the fons et origo of culture, given that in a metaphysical or phallogocentric universe it is the natural origin of culture, Zola winds up, through the imposition of technique, putting the arranged, natural order in doubt. In so doing, he renders the bouquets and bunches figures of artifice and the artificial; the colors he ascribes to the various vegetables become a kind of precursor to twentieth-century marketing techniques that need carrots to be bright orange and tomatoes to be bright red. In French, it is said that one does not debate tastes and colors (des gouˆts et des couleurs), but here, with Zola, one could add the hidden factor: this obtains provided that those who refuse to debate them, those who accept (or ‘‘accept’’) the tastes of others are nice, clean middle-class individuals, far from the dirt and fertilizer of agricultural reality and just as far from the colonial economy that sustains at least part of that system. Before turning to an analysis of the maritime scene, I should like to look briefly at a series of descriptions that is often neglected, the scene in which animal carcasses are unloaded. Here, just as in the later scene in which Zola gives a detailed description of poultry, not only does the author not hide the disorder, but he also celebrates it with gleeful abandon. The system will arrange everything by hiding blood and odors, removing the excessive, and trimming away the waste. Zola’s project is to correct nature, something already implicit in the arrangement of the vegetables that implied a ‘‘before’’ of disorder. Zola ups the stakes and makes his reader, or at least his narratee, a rhetorical coconspirator for whom he does not remove the signs of violence, murder, and cruelty, on which the gastro-economic system entirely depends. To provide food, it is necessary to tame, domesticate, and breed

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animals; agriculture determines an order of things not inherent in the economy of hunter-gatherers, even if the latter do have systems and tricks of the trade. To have a grounded agricultural economy, it is necessary to tame some animals, kill others, and remove what cannot be used by separating the wheat from the chaff. Florent is the figure of that excess and waste, at least in the eyes of the system, and in almost a christological manner: he is ‘‘the stone that the builders rejected.’’ Yet the system must refuse him, reject him, and send him back to the devil. At the same time, things stink, both literally and figuratively: the waste ferments, piquing and peppering the system that would not know with living memories and sensations of the colonial and imperial economy. As Florent makes the system ferment and boil, it merely remains to be seen whether or not the state can re-diabolize him and send him back to his own private hell. At the simplest level, the symphony of fishes has multiple functions within the novel, and similar to the vegetable still life but different from some of the other tableaux, the symphony has a phenomenological function at the level of the plot, as it puts Florent—vegetal from his name, meaty according to his family’s trade—into contact with the pisciform, the ‘‘other’’ to meat, the ‘‘other’’ to meet, as it marks his crossing into another world in which he will serve to transmit knowledge that is now, by definition, always knowledge of and from the other. Given that the vegetal realm is presented as both natural and neuter, all the other realms will somehow manifest divides: between mammalian and bird flesh on the one hand and fish on the other, between fat and thin, with Lisa Quenu and her pork products on one side of the divide and ‘‘la belle Normande’’ on the other. Florent, the cross-over taste, the fiery pepper that sparks the flames, is introduced as the new fish inspector: meat dominating fish and solid dominating liquid in a scheme that is necessarily going to provide the spark that upsets the system and sets off certain mechanisms in the plot. At the same time, this introduction is the preface to the introduction of figures of real power at a more pervasive level—police, inspectors, the bourgeois, the fat, teachers—all of whom, in one way or another, control the weak and the thin. Ironically, Florent will temporarily be a figure of power in a system in which he was once a victim and to which he will be sacrificed once again at the end of the novel. Zola uses this second great display to insist on the artifice of order, yet he does so, ironically, in a way that puts his art and his mastery of it in the best light: artifice will set off other artifice. But in so doing, he cannot prevent himself from repeating the system as his signs are forced to refigure what

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they represent, nor can he avoid mining the system from within by providing, necessarily and inevitably, a mise-en-abyme of artistic creation within the display. Interestingly, the details of the display call into question basic issues of communication, knowledge, and transmission of a cultural and artisanal heritage, while simultaneously showing the effect of the imposition introduced by the violence of language itself on the ebbs and flows of the system. The first and most important trait here to engage in an analysis of the artifice of the verisimilar is nomination itself. To call a fish by its proper name, its Linnean nomenclature, is to fix it in a spot in an ichthyological order, but that scientific practice is as far removed from practical and artisanal knowledge as it can be. Yet to call it by its agreed upon name, which is the only way to get readers to understand what the subject of the description is, is means to an end of polyvalency, inaccuracy, and confusion. Not to put too fine a point on it, fish are figures of migration and the very raison d’eˆtre for certain economic adventures, both precolonial and colonial: migrating Phocaeans who would found Marseilles, Norsemen discovering America, the entire cod industry.92 Fish are both local and global, and, unlike in animal husbandry, the local and the global are often in contradiction. The name is supposed to pin down the fish, but to do so, literally and symbolically, is to kill it to no end. Some fish have several names; some names refer ambiguously to a variety of different fish; as with seasoning, fish and nomination often float by one another. To take only the most striking example, real bouillabaisse, so they say, cannot be made more than fifty kilometers from Marseilles, yet a true bouillabaisse is traditionally made with what the fishmonger or the fishermen could not sell, with the singular exception of the obligatory rascasse (scorpion fish). Could that one fish be the entire authentification and justification unto itself, even though the bouillabaisse varies extensively from day to day? Thus does Zola ironically name and detail a system that is an imperfect system of nomination, one that both hides and displays its imperfections, one that, to boot, hides the migratory, colonial economy that would feed the bourgeoisie. The second important stylistic trait of this e´talage is color, already used effectively by the author in the vegetable display. What he adds here is an insistence on the physicality of forms: curves, lumps, knots, spots, stripes, and motley patterns of one sort or another. Set in apposition to the improper names that label the fish in the vernacular, these terms are marks of the insufficiency and inability of language to denote and inscribe reality in all its sundry details. Language cannot be sufficient and its role is less to describe the object it purportedly represents than to indicate what sets that object off

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from the others. In order to have an economical description, the description must be anything but that. The narrator chooses what marks the object distinctively and leaves to one side that in which it has no interest and which it cannot describe. Thus does this literary language strangely repeat and reconfirm the action of the butcher, an action that is literally, graphically, and materially introduced into the description in a mise-en-abyme of the artist’s own gesture. Zola directly and consciously includes an aesthetic element in writing about ‘‘beautiful fish,’’93 and we might consider this a momentary stylistic lapse or an easy way out but that he follows it with another subjective aesthetic remark, as he writes of the carp that are ‘‘so beautiful with there metallic red spots.’’94 Rather than describe what he sees in his mind’s eye, the narrator lets art deform the representation as it moves the object further away from the natural and closer to the artificial: the fish are then described in the vocabulary of clothing and make-up, and the fish, described, in a rather sexist language, as being like ‘‘ladies,’’ are exquisite and pretty. And yet, perhaps in recognition of the violence wielded on objects by the language and the strategies he uses to impose language to bring matter into order, Zola obligatorily introduces violence as a figure within the text, the description miming the act of inscription: writing of lobsters, he notes ‘‘their broken claws cracked’’ in ‘‘that colossal still-life.’’95 Dead indeed, killed by language that was supposed to bring verisimilar life and truth to what was being described. That violence within the text is another way of formulating the figure of the excess, which abounds on all sides, that figure that is both too much and too little, an overabundance that is also an inadequacy and an imprecision that will make the system implode, a system that Zola will ultimately bring to its apogee in Germinal. Thus there is no artistic thaumaturgy; the author can touch the wound but cannot cure it. Yet we should make a distinction here. As has already been indicated, part of the explanation for the plot mechanism relative to Florent is a Girardian scapegoat mechanism. But that obtains only at the level of plot and only if we believe that the verisimilar representation is working. Yet what happens when verisimilitude is not working is, quite simply, that the mechanisms of whatever sort—Girardian scapegoats, Freudian Oedipal complexes, Deleuzian rhizomatics—do not work if language deforms what it sets out to represent. Thus here, in this description, it is not a question so much of Girardian mimetic behavior as it is of the impossibility of adequation between the word and the thing it purports to describe, an adequation that would be the necessary—though here, impossible—link to let an economy function according to the rules.

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For the consumer of a beautiful brill (barbue) not to have matters weigh too heavily on his or her conscience, nothing will be mentioned of slave ships, of sugar cane, or of the colonized. The pretense is that any meal is local and that it does not participate in a generalized economy. But here, the author goes even further; what makes much of the plot function is precisely nothing, a gap between two sides, a void marked by an empty signifier: a wound in the side of a fish. Nothing at all, yet, the nothing that leads to disputes, to paranoia, to the entire fear mechanism implied by the book. Let us leave to one side the obvious symbolic interpretation of the christological ichthyos along with the wound in the side of the crucified Jesus. We are not at all in the realm of the symbolic; we are merely in a realm in which the verisimilar, the representational, and the semiotic fall short of their goals of presenting. And it is tempting to give a Girardian interpretation to the scene, for his model does explain things well. There is an economy of place in which violence breeds more violence, as if this world of Les Halles were itself a pressure cooker or a prison cell. This mimetic violence finally explodes and requires the sacrifice of the valued, overvalued, and devalued object: the fish or Florent, it little matters. To that end, I would underline the importance of the wound or gash that is both excess and insufficiency. And yet this interpretation that revolves around a simple representational model does not do justice to the novel, or at least not full justice, because the text is subjected both to the psychological, which has no real currency here, and to a triangulated economic model that is reductive at best. The displays of poultry recapitulate those of the meat carcasses. Here, as there, it is a matter of body parts, of what one may eat, and of what is rejected—down and feathers, for example, plus the inedible organs—and it is still a matter of excess and, as one might have expected, of blood as well. Everything overflows in what is perhaps the first well-known example of liquid excess that Zola will repeat in the wash-house scene in L’Assommoir and in the flooding of the mine in Germinal. Liquid takes over: ‘‘Margolin had not even wiped off the cutting board.’’96 Through his language, Zola renders the potentially edible something unspeakable. If an inherent quality of chicken from the point of view of culture and civilization is its comestibility, Zola manages to eviscerate the signifie´ of that essential trait; he thereby denatures the object and uncouples not the signifier and the referent, but the signified from both. It is not without irony that Zola deploys the expression ‘‘at the bottom of all that food’’97 even as he makes as great an effort as possible to make that food inedible. Again, this is a foundational moment for the signs of inedibility throughout the series: something ‘‘immonde’’ that

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Gervaise eats before her death in L’Assommoir, the wood gnawed on in the mine in Germinal, as well as the impaled male member in the same novel that Madame Hennebeau sees as a scrap [debris] of pork. In many ways, the description of the fruit display is iterative when it comes to the techniques of defamiliarization that lead to matters of excess and insufficiency. It seems that this is almost a sterile exercise in order to speed toward the final tableau, the symphony of cheeses, which is even stronger than the description of the display of fish. Still there are some things to be learned from this still life about the representational politics of this novel. Again, on the level of plot, the vegetal returns, in a reinscription of the to-and-fro surface nature of alternance that is not matched by any deep inscription of difference. That is to say, while the vegetal seems edenic and the animal, somewhat brutal, at a deeper level both are representations of the violence and economy of cultivation. This time, however, with the representation of the vegetal, Zola has changed the stakes from the purportedly natural vegetables (which are not natural) to the falsely vegetal. Like fish, the fruits have specific attributed names both for species and for a specific cultivar or variety. But if fish are generally wild and natural (pisciculture, as opposed to ostreiculture, being basically a twentieth-century paradigm), fruits are the products of thousands of years of agricultural cultivation and forced hybridization, products of a popular, artisanal knowledge that precedes the details of Gregor Mendel’s laws of heredity by millenia. Flaubert will also display this technique of describing hybridization, with notably monstrous results, in the agricultural scenes of Bouvard et Pe´cuchet. So to speak the name of a specific variety of fruit is to speak of the entirety of the human culture of agriculture, to give a name that goes too well because it is exact where the popular name of a fish is imprecise. Thus might one be tempted to think that these fruits would be the perfect objects in Zola’s economy of writing. But they cannot be so, because he insists on eroticizing the system of nomination, thereby moving it away from precision and creating an Entfremdungseffekt or an ostranenie, a defamiliarization of the obvious that does not lead, as the Formalists suggested, to a re-vision of the familiar, but rather to an exoticization of the familiar: ‘‘the ruddiness of budding breasts, shoulders, golden hips, a complete discreet nudity.’’98 Or again, ‘‘the too narrow lips of a Chinese woman who was smiling.’’99 Orientalist fruit becomes heterosexist, masculist fantasy, a world away from the verisimilar representation of the ordinary. We have arrived at the cheese course. But it makes strategic and cultural sense to speak first of the charcuterie, if only because in a novel or in a

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French meal, the consumer should respect the established order of things. And the question of charcuterie is a more complex one in these tableaux than any of the others, for it involves a visible process as well as a set display: it is a spread of knowledge as well as a spread of food products. Equally important is the fact that unlike the other displays, the charcuterie, functioning as a leitmotif in the novel, is spread over time and space in the novel and not confined to a single set of pages in one masterful description. Charcuterie changes as the novel develops, yet at the same time it is a constant referent. The first presentation of charcuterie is textually simultaneous with the presentation of Lisa Quenu. Each is the equivalent of the other. In this initial presentation, Zola falls back on a classical, Balzacian technique, and in so doing, he is both setting the stage for the production of stereotypical verisimilitude and developing the means by which he will supersede verisimilitude while seemingly remaining in fealty to it. Well known to readers of La Come´die humaine, in works such as Le Pe`re Goriot and Euge´nie Grandet, is a technique in which the author uses a description of a space as a complex metonym for the reigning ambiance, psychology, and moral climate in which he will set the story. Thus does Balzac describe the rather brooding Grandet house by focusing on its physical fac¸ade, and the incredibly welldetailed description of the Maison Vauquer, in both its situation on the lessthan-fashionable Rue de la Montagne Sainte-Genevie`ve and its public rooms that sweat misery, leads us to an instant understanding of the situation of the individuals who inhabit that boarding house. Still, if Zola takes his cue from Balzac, the imposition of his own methodical approach to narration and representation do not in fact lead to the same result; the total absence of the psychological in Zola, which is one of the realms that grounds the Balzacian text, leads to a gap in the representation. Everything in Zola’s text becomes performatively moral and social; at the same time, in this singular moment of presentation, everything is still in harmony. Yet there is another capital difference, for as much as the presentation of the verisimilar depends on the belief in subjectivity, it also depends on an agreed-upon objectivity. Zola goes so far as to challenge all the absolutes in which Balzac believes, aside from science; Zola will dismantle, analyze, and deconstruct the received knowledge that is figured in the final sentence of the opening of Le Ventre de Paris: ‘‘She had an air of great honesty about her.’’100 The resounding ironic undoing of middle-class morality will be fulfilled with the last line of the novel: ‘‘What rascals honest people are!’’101 And with that

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fulfillment, which goes way beyond an analysis of underlying hypocrisy, Zola completes the demonstration of the novel’s inability to ground itself. Essential to the figures being discussed is the unexpected use of details, as if the reader, cast as rhetorical coconspiritor in this undoing of verisimilitude, knew as much as the narrator-author does through his copious observations, note-takings, and scientific method. While Balzac developed his captatio benevolentiae through the use of seeming platitudes and generalized observations—notably with phrases like ‘‘un(e) de ces’’ and negative interrogatives, both of which demand the reader’s acquiescence—Zola takes a rhetorical turn to indicate something precisely that we would not otherwise have known: ‘‘Her flesh, peaceful, had that transparent whiteness, that fine, moist skin of people who ordinarily spend their lives [working] with fats and raw meat.’’102 Now, quite frankly, if we might have guessed, as educated, knowledgeable readers familiar with the uses of lanolin, that fat might have a beneficial effect on the skin by making it smoother, it is far less likely that we would have guessed the effects of raw meat on skin tone. More probably, our received knowledge would ascribe either a positive physiological effect to raw meat—iron-rich meat that might be tonic in combating anemia—or a negative, deleterious one: the possibility of getting trichinosis from pork or, more recently, salmonella from chicken and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow disease) from beef; but in no way would we ascribe some positive dermatological effect to it, aside from a slab of cold raw meat being a useful home remedy for a black eye. Zola does not remain long either in the balanced harmony I have described or in the unexpected scientific explanation, for almost immediately he seeks to establish the imbalance necessary to him. Excess immediately appears in the images of a woman who is not ‘‘too fat,’’103 an allusion to that fact that she might eventually be, despite her rather protestant (and therefore thin) work ethic; and yet, she is quite solid and even busty.104 The author leads us to believe that Lisa’s flesh, the non-excessive generosity of Lisa’s flesh, will be directly translated into a generosity with sausage meat, as long as she can be self-sufficient, as long as life will provide her what she needs. Having presented the charcutie`re in harmony with her shop and its offerings, as if to reinforce the matter, Zola passes directly to the relational, as she is identified as Florent’s sister-in-law;105 yet we know immediately that this self-sufficiency, smug self-satisfaction, and carnal generosity will not last, as the relational bond is challenged and tested. Again what is in the balance is precisely the balance of representation, the possibility of producing belief in the act of representation.

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The business thrives, moves, changes, and glows, as do its products: already as a child, Quenu was suffused with the mysteries of its production and with the thaumaturgy involved in transmitting heat to food and even to animals so that they can become food. Charcuterie is formation and transformation, with solids emitting their liquids, their ‘‘juice,’’ to use the word frequently employed.106 Everything is transformed, and this transformation from the very beginning attracts Quenu as a young man, bewitching and transfixing him in the process. Just as Lisa represents her shop and her shop represents her in a reminiscence of Madame Vauquer and her boarding house, Quenu and his charcuterie are interchangeable. He implicates himself deeply: eating, licking, and watching the liquids bubble; these liquids are the product of science, the amor scientiae that accompanies transmitted knowledge; they produce difference that, once again, cannot be pinned down: ‘‘Then, seeing Florent listen to him, when he explained some very complicated dish, he admitted his vocation, he entered into a great restaurant.’’107 Vocation, evocation, and formation are all a call to some presence and some ex-stasis that follow, yet they go beyond the laws of physics, the recipes, and the rules that give order and produce constraint: ‘‘He returned fatally to the meat taken off the spit, to the juices that force one to lick his or her fingers.’’108 Life seems to be in order and appears well regulated; Quenu’s plenitude matches Lisa’s; it follows that representation must be well regulated as well. Thus when the system works, the representation of the system works as well, for the necessary adequation seems to be there and the perspective on system and its representation is even, full, and direct. When there is neither lack nor excess, everything is programmed, even mechanically so, to create the society and its representations that are figures of the stable, regulated, and regular economy: In the morning, when work was the busiest, when the girl came to the kitchen, their hands met in the middle of the ground meat. Sometimes she helped him; she held the casings with her chubby fingers while he filled them with meat and fat. Or they tasted the raw meat of the sausages together, with the tips of their tongues, to see if it was seasoned correctly. She was a good advisor, knew the recipes of the South, which he made with great success.109

Everything is in working order: the transmission of things, money, and knowledge is accompanied by the transubstantiation of matter, as raw flesh becomes sausages; for the moment, representation and the economy both

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point toward conventional success. A regular and appropriate pace keeps the systems on an even keel, and there is nothing excessive nor anything lacking in the display of knowledge, foodstuffs, or textuality; there are no detours in the system. When things are in order in the system, everything, including verisimilar representation, works. Yet at the same time, as soon as there is stasis, homeostasis, or equilibrium, the discourse of the novel winds up fetishizing that which it is describing and the very act of description threatens the stability of what it describes by creating a lack or an excess, if not both. Zola would have us believe in the twinning of verisimilar representation and a progress narrative. One might wonder if those two categories are as complicit as we think: after all, one is associated with the development of a plot with a telos; the other is an aesthetic, poetic, and figural effect associated with representation of any sort, separate and apart from a plot, and more likely to be associated with the realm of the visual and the psychological than with progress itself. The very belief in representability is not in and of itself a figure of the progress narrative. In spite of his rejection of Balzac’s moral, epistemological, and ontological values, which he has replaced with his scientific method, Zola seems to be willing to impose order on eventual disorder, in the thread of the charcuterie, precisely because that thread stands in by metonymy for Lisa and Quenu as figures of stability and by synecdoche for the economic system to which order, no matter how hypocritically determined, is necessary. Apprenticeships, rules, methods, and recipes maintain order; they are, in short, the discourses on and of the method, Cartesian approaches to regulating even the most difficult and subtle matters. It is thus with the fairly complicated production of the blood sausages; yet as intricate and as difficult as the process may be, those making it do not risk disorder. It is necessary only to foresee a possible complication to avoid it: ‘‘In order that they not burst or get tied in knots, he took them with a stick, wound them around it, and carried them to the courtyard, where they could dry quickly on tiles. Leon helped him and held up the ends that were too long.’’110 In this singular exception in the novel to Zola’s deregulation of the system and the processes of representation and therefore the impossibilities of verisimilitude, all excess can be reintegrated into the system; there is no ‘‘dangerous supplement’’ nor any absence at the heart of being. The last sentence of the passage in question says it all, for it leaves all danger in the realm of the virtual, safely apart from the representation and the represented: ‘‘They were all breathing hard as if they had eaten too much.’’111 The Kantian ‘‘as if ’’ reigns and allows representation to occur as it does in Kant’s own idealist model. But

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elsewhere in the novel, the danger creeps in, not as a dangerous supplement but as a supplementary danger that upsets the order of the represented and interferes with the order of representation. If charcuterie represents and is represented by order, the symphony of cheeses, the final tableau, is its antiphonal, antistrophal, and palinodic inversion. Like charcuterie, cheese is a product of human knowledge and transmitted artisanal know-how. But unlike charcuterie, cheese is a product of rot or infection, not of transformation through heat (though sometimes heat is involved, of course). And so it seems obvious that the author would choose to associate charcuterie with progress and representability and cheese with liquefaction, violence, and the receding of the verisimilar. While good odors and savory smells dominate the presentation of charcuterie, with cheese, as one might have expected, it is the reign of decomposition, illness, the plague, and death; simply put, ‘‘the cheese stunk.’’112 There is no way to hide this pestilential odor and no way to make it acceptable; it wafts through space leaving no blanks for representation; the stink is the smell of rot and decomposition, the trace of the self-deconstructing text. If Zola tends to deploy the same techniques here as in the other descriptions, he does add an insistent ground bass that is an amalgam of infernal origins, extended violence, decomposition, and death, as he uses expressions and words like ‘‘from hatchet blows’’ (a` coups de hache), ‘‘bruised’’ (meurtris), ‘‘gamy/decomposing’’ (faisande´s), ‘‘nausea’’ (nausea), and so forth. The dairy symphony itself is the illustration of the insufficiencies of textual representability; it is the metaphor for the novel, the equivalent of the novel, the dissipation of verisimilitude into disorder. No longer the novel of verisimilar representation, the text is its illness, as well as societal infection; texts and cheeses are pharmakoi. The novel that begins with a celebration of and through knowledge approaches its conclusion by acknowledging that the illness of the other, its sick economy, its social ailments epitomized in rot and putrefaction, have infected textuality and representability themselves: ‘‘And behind the scales, in its thin box, an anise-flavored ge´rome´ was giving off such an infection that flies had fallen around the box, on the grayveined red marble.’’113 Still, Zola goes one step further, one final step in his deployment of decomposition, for the symphony of cheeses becomes rancid and the infection becomes epidemic; there is a ‘‘cacaphony of disgusting airs’’ and an ‘‘explosion of stink. It spread and stayed there, no longer having distinct odors, amidst the general vibration of a continuous dizziness of nausea and a terrible force of asphyxiation. It seemed, however, that it was the bad words of

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Madame Lecœur and Mademoiselle Saget that stunk so much.’’114 Society is ill at heart and words can either kill or spread the illness. As Yvonne Bargues-Rollins so deftly illustrates, there is an intimate relationship between the stink of the cheeses and that of ‘‘the words of those who speak ill of others.’’115 That ambiguity of language brings us necessarily to the final question of the novel: the inscription of excess and insufficiency in language, in other words, that final formation that is pedagogy. That pedagogy is glimpsed at two moments: the effect of Florent’s own education and his education, in turn, of Muche, the wild child. Florent’s own education backfires; instead of teaching him to be a citizen respectful of the law and the state, it produces a radical, revolutionary enemy of the state. What is of interest here is precisely the retranslation of this perversion of knowledge into his own mission of instruction. When he becomes a teacher, when he teaches Muche, what will happen? Will excess, disorder, and insufficiency be reintegrated in the sausage model or will they run wild like the odors of cheese? Will Florent be able to represent things in the dispassionate, objective way to which Zola aspires? Or will he do as Zola does and succumb to the pharmakon of writing, the two-edged sword that impedes verisimilitude just as it seems to foster it? A hybrid himself made of contradictions and oppositions, Muche is clearly the one who, like Florent himself, can never be fully integrated into the system. With the foul language of a sailor or truck-driver that ‘‘would tear a policeman’s gullet,’’116 Muche would be a nightmare student for most teachers but the ideal student for Florent who has already seen everything and been the victim of a people and state that are ‘‘bien-pensant.’’ While mastering what Florent offers him in facts, theories, axioms, and methods, Muche can be the perfect student for this teacher, if by perfect we understand ‘‘imperfect.’’ He will be the student of the revolution, the personification of excess and deficiency; he is the figure of the writer, long before the eponymous hero of Le Docteur Pascal, long before the child of hope that is born of incest in that novel. And this in spite of the fact that the words lead nowhere here: Florent’s teaching is turned against him by an accusation of pedophilia,117 long before Zola decides to devote an entire novel to that figure, Ve´rite´, in which the institutions of right will cover things up while choosing a propitiatory victim. But the programmatic polemic that Zola will write in that late novel in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair is not as sharply focused here and remains at the level of a generalized perception of danger, one perceived acutely by the thought-police, the police themselves:

Flaubert and Zola: Challenges to Verisimilitude 107 However, the inspector read the writing models and looked serious. The ‘‘tyrannically,’’ ‘‘freedom-killing,’’ ‘‘unconstitutional,’’ and ‘‘revolutionary’’ made him frown. When he read the sentence, ‘‘When the hour struck, the guilty man fell,’’ he gave light taps to the papers, while saying: ‘‘This is very serious, very serious.’’118

And of course it is serious, for good teaching can lead to a revolution or a novel or both. In Le Ventre de Paris, Zola bravely tests the waters of representation and discovers that the modes of representation he needs in order to make his polemical arguments about the summum bonum and against societal ills are not necessarily totally in sync with the method of realist and naturalist representation. He will go on to use set pieces such as the white symphony in Au bonheur des dames, deploy violence and liquefaction, and introduce mechanical figures that take over the plot such as the machine in the title of L’Assommoir and the train in La Beˆte humaine. Retreating from Balzac’s Kantian representation and from Flaubert’s security in apoliticism and a fetishizing of style, Zola will lead his readers toward the imperfect.

Deipnomachy, or Cooking with Zola In recent years, a number of studies have been devoted to the functions of food as a cultural object; food studies themselves have become an important developing field within the larger field of cultural studies. Part of the material world, food has always had a status as a cultural object, but recent work has recognized those cultural values and structures as part of interpretative systems and as parts of systems to be interpreted. The structuring value that food has within culture is well-known, whether it is a matter of ‘‘the raw and the cooked’’ as Claude Le´vi-Strauss put it, the origin of table manners, as Norbert Elias would have it, or more generally, the functions of hunters, gatherers, and eventually cultivators within developing societies. The literary semioticity ascribed to food in Zola’s Germinal is a leap beyond what he does in Le Ventre de Paris, for in Germinal, he uses food to signify insufficiencies and complications in the social and political order that he finds no other way to render. Still, before getting to the food of Germinal, this development needs to be placed in a general context. In the nineteenth century, French culture places a specific and conscious set of values on food, running from the early Grimod de la Reynie`re and Brillat-Savarin through Careˆme and the development and codification of French haute cuisine and

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the rise of the restaurant and moving on toward a domestic codification of cuisine bourgeoise, perhaps finally ending with the first regional travel guides, assembled by Rouff and Curnonsky in the 1920s.119 Not only is food an unconsciously structuring figure within the practico-inert of society, it is also the object of a set of investigations in which its form, production, presentation, and content are themselves assigned values. Brillat-Savarin famously challenged individuals in society to tell him what they ate; having heard that, he would tell them what they were. And one need go no further than one of the cornerstones of poststructuralist French theory, Pierre Bourdieu’s epoch-making La Distinction, to find the ‘‘scientific’’ confirmation of Brillat-Savarin’s insight about the association of specific foods and social strata. Realist and naturalist novels evince a phenomenon that parallels the real world. Modest meals are described at the Pension Vauquer in Le Pe`re Goriot, bread is the staff of life in Les Mise´rables, there is an ironic wedding banquet in L’Assommoir, after which the solidity of food will be replaced by the liquidity of alcohol.120 And later, in the Recherche, there is an ongoing semiotics of food and drink: madeleines and herbal tea (tisane) for the narrator, the beef stew (bœuf en daube), the asparagus, the chicken as ‘‘dirty beast (sale beˆte), and so forth, all of which relate to the character of Franc¸oise and her functions, and there are the various ice creams, teas, breads, drinks, salads, meals, and banquets associated with one character or a group of characters. And yet there is a significant omission here; the studies and texts are all skewed high, for they are in fact based on the availability of food and on the ingestion thereof. One is hard put, within this period of developing capitalism and materialism in society and to find reflected in literature evidence of the low end of the scale, an end that goes from starvation and the complete or relative unavailability of food to continued subsistence living; Jean Valjean may be hungry, but he steals bread just once. Food persuades by its presence and variety, not by its absence. There are certain obvious exceptions to this general rule of thumb: Kafka’s later ironic tale ‘‘Ein Hungerku¨nstler,’’ as well as narratives of illness (especially tuberculosis) or of religious deprivation about anachorites and martyrs. But basically, the group of works available within realism is a small one for works not inflected by codes of medicine, pathology, religious zeal, or existential irony. The dissolving of starvation into materiality—into Jean Valjean’s theft of bread—is an early example here, but Hugo uses this as a passing moment with which to begin a progress narrative. Perhaps out of the implicit belief in materialism and progress, realism seldom engages this dematerialized low end of the food

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scale. From Jean Valjean’s bread through Balzac’s pension food, from the killing of the animals in the Paris Zoo for food during the Commune ` vau l’eau and on to the abject food described by through Maupassant’s A Octave Mirbeau in Le Jardin des supplices, there are only a few examples of cuisine modeste. Standing alone is one striking literary example in which a true poetics of poverty is explored: E´mile Zola’s Germinal. Zola uses the dearth and absence of food as a leitmotif for illuminating the subsistence living of his characters in a mining village who barely are part of the nineteenth century’s progress narratives, except insofar as they themselves are fodder for the capitalist machine and its owners. As Carol Mossman remarks, ‘‘the whole notion of eating and digestion . . . is central to the thematics of difference . . . It is more a matter of who eats whom.’’121 This is the novel of the cuisine du pauvre.122 In Germinal, food is an indication of station and status: roast partridge for the rich,123 a ‘‘handful of vermicelli that she had been keeping for three days’’ for the poor.124 Even worse, in a parody of the ave`nement of a beheading, the semiotics of food becomes a sign of a hand-me-down, a brioche offered to the poor children of the Maheu family; it is second-hand bread,125 and it makes us think of Marie-Antoinette’s rather fateful, though perhaps apocryphal, remark: ‘‘Let them eat cake’’ (Qu’ils mangent de la brioche). Thematically, the cycles of food in this novel are a mark of the author’s set pieces: here, in the attenuation of a banquet, with its procession of courses; there, in the growing hunger, both physical and spiritual, of the crowd. Zola creates a food fight—what we might call a deipnomachy— between the haves and the have nots, between those who consume and those who are consumed, a serious, not to say tragic version, of Rabelaisian, carnivalesque deipnomachies. Zola’s narrative is based on two interrelated semioticities of food. The more predictable one is oppositional: the contrast between the food of the rich and that of the poor, an illustration of what Brian Nelson calls the ‘‘social dissonance’’ of the novel,126 seen most blatantly in the studied, structured opposition of meals and choices between any meal eaten at Le Voreux and the Hennebeaus’ substantial, opulent, and plentiful meal offered by the lady of the house (with her complicitous servants) to her guests. The other semioticity is the articulation of the cuisine du pauvre for itself within the novel. Zola develops a poetics of this low end of the food scale, one that is from time to time both implicitly and explicitly contrasted to the sated high end of the scale but which most of the time he tries to explore as an entity separated by an abyss from even the most basic cuisine modeste. Between the

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food of those in Le Voreux and even the most humble peasant lies a gulf that cannot be crossed within the system, one that, Zola suggests, could be traversed only by a revolutionary change, figured in the anarchist bombing used as a deus ex machina and as a machine de guerre toward the end of the novel. On the poor side of the gulf, different laws apply to food semiotics, laws of divisibility and grouping, laws of availability and absence, laws of no choice, laws of liquidity opposed to and in contrast with the solid materiality of nineteenth-century capitalist culture. In L’Assommoir, the food of the poor is already burnt before the thermodynamics of systems or already drowned in an attenuation of the solid into the infinitely dissolvable.127 The wedding feast in L’Assommoir and the country fair (ducasse) in Germinal are both a recognition of the scarceness of bien-eˆtre for Zola’s economically poorer characters and their false hope of communion, peace, and success, ironic last suppers as it were. The feast for the poor is illusory, the narrator/author seems to be saying; only true social action will solve the social, political, and economic injustices of nineteenth-century French society. Feast is only a temporary or stopgap measure within a continuity of famine, a hunger reflected in the very landscape of Montsou, with its ‘‘cry of famine’’ and its ‘‘cry of hunger.’’128 In Germinal, Zola repeatedly links food and politics in a playing out of one of the bases of his Naturalist system of exchange.129 The first two parts of the novel are in part a very literal narrative meditation on Marie-Antoinette’s already mentioned remark. This remark betrays not only her political naivete´, but also her lack of understanding of the chemistry of food.130 Beyond that, the scarcity of food, the miracles that have to happen with the minimum amount of food available, and the bonds formed among female characters over food, drink, and provisions all interrelate with the everincreasing need for revolution: starvation creates both community and conflict. There is an opposition between those who may be perceived, within the poor community, to have and those thinking they have not, but there is also the sense of community built around absence, self-sacrifice, and vengeance, as in the moment of the sparagmos of Maigrat, guilty of having exacted sexual favors against an extension of credit. In Germinal, empty stomachs are the sites of radical politics and the borborygmous rumblings of empty stomachs are the vox populi crying out for change. As David Bell puts it, Germinal is ‘‘the most developed of the novels of ‘opposition’ ’’ in Les Rougon-Macquart.131 For Zola, the rhetoric of rich food is characterized by codification—each example being a metonym of grande cuisine or more modestly of cuisine bourgeoise, subject to a similar but less excessive code—and by surfeit and excess.

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No such codification exists for the food of the poor. That food is marked instead by a rhetoric of scarcity, absence, and abjection. Food of the poor poetically borders on the inedible, the non-eaten, and the marginal; there is the hovering of death, and as David Bellos has pointed out, there is an equivalence between eating and killing;132 beyond that, it is not so clear who is eating whom or who is being killed in the process of consumption. This food borders on chaos, with disorder and liquidity replacing sustenance, solidity, and a metaphysical pneuma that is the secular translation of the Eucharist. An examination of specific examples of the cuisine du pauvre in Zola’s novel will elucidate his poetics and semiotics of impoverishment: starting with the abject example of using yesterday’s coffee grounds to make today’s coffee and finishing with the castration of Maigrat and the parading of his genitalia as if they were some bit of offal, this analysis will develop the amplitude and implications of this double history of the cuisine du pauvre. Of all the foodstuffs that we face on a daily basis, there is perhaps nothing more abject than coffee grounds: their flavor having been extracted, their solidity becomes extraneous, disposable, and superfluous within the realm of the substantial; only a slightly eccentric or penny-pinching person would consider reusing them. And yet Zola makes his point from the very beginning with ‘‘the coffee grounds of the day before.’’133 There is nothing more desperate or impoverished on a human level than being reduced to using what has already been eaten, chewed, drunk, rejected, pissed away, or defecated. ‘‘Le marc de la veille’’ is the sign of the poverty of those who suffer, those whom Zola champions, those eaten by the voracious devouring mine, more than aptly named ‘‘Le Voreux,’’ which Mitterand aptly calls ‘‘hell [enfer] and grave, Captivity [Enfermement] and condemnation, a space deprived of light and exits.’’134 In contrast to those whose diet includes yesterday’s coffee grounds and like the bourgeois who consume far more than they need, the mine gluttonously eats countable pieces of food by ingesting people in a gargantuan feast motivated by the giant tapeworm in its bowels: ‘‘E´tienne understood only one thing well: the mine swallowed twenty or thirty men in one mouthful.’’135 Or again, the mine is hungry, a devouring, gaping hole endlessly being fed: ‘‘For half an hour, the mine devoured [them] in the same way, with a more or less gluttonous craw.’’136 The mine is the metonym of the abusive society, but with one exception: like the poor of the hamlet, it too will eat whatever comes its way, expendable humans, the detritus of a willfully malevolent society. Figure of the society, it sits on top of it and the two ends meet: those who are reduced to using yesterday’s coffee grounds and

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that which will consume them; the omnivorous meets the gleaners in a society that is both ‘‘avare’’ and ‘‘haineuse.’’137 Le marc de la veille is the detritus of a product gathered in exotic lands by hands poorer than those of the miners and their families. Like sugar and cotton, coffee evokes colonial abuse, slavery, capitalist and imperialist profiteering, and, with its triangulated economy, the antecedent of transnationalism. Like salt in imperial Rome, coffee and sugar are coded with a kind of affective surplus value. When we associate ‘‘goodness’’ with such materials, at least within the praxis of our daily lives, we seldom if ever think of the bloody, imperialist, and colonial past that implies the trilateral slave trade, massacres of indigenous peoples, and the foundation of nation states at the heart of transcontinental empires. The situation described by Zola of the production of coal from the mines and symbolized as well by the rape of the land is part and parcel of the imperial system in which industry, fueled by that coal, takes the raw products from empire to turn them into disposable goods for the wealthy. Coffee is roasted, pulverized, and consumed. Like coal, it is a hard, dark substance. One is consumed by heat alone, the other by water and heat. Both provide warmth as long as they last, but there is no storage, no aftereffect, and no carbopacking from either. Madame de Se´vigne´ apocryphally misreads Racine as a fad—‘‘He will run his course like coffee’’ (Il passera comme le cafe´)—yet the flow implied in that sentence proves to be far more on target than the prediction of faddishness. When abundant, coffee (standing in part as metonym for the entire imperial economic system) and coal are the dark fodder that stokes the fires; when scarce or absent, coffee and coal are the marks of the failure of the system. To be reduced to using yesterday’s coffee grounds is to be marked as marginal and expendable—there will always be other workers—but to be necessary to its voracious machine. Eat or be eaten; eat and be eaten: Zola offers little hope for those consuming abject detritus. The coffee grounds of the day before are but one figure of the interrelation of substance and the abject, a figure resumed in the vague borderland between the two that is neither solid nor liquid, neither fully whole nor fully pulverized.138 Yet that borderland is not merely defined as a meeting spot but as the defined spheres. It is not just a question of social Darwinism, but also of the decomposition of the starved subject to the abject position: eat and be eaten, do not eat and be eaten anyway, it little matters. At the edge of food, at the border between the edible and its others, everything

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deconstructs, decomposes, and turns into the marginal edibility of ‘‘le marc de la veille.’’ For the poor of Germinal, food exists at the margins of existence, and Zola makes the acts of eating both central and peripheral to them. The centered action of consumption, that of the mine, or, metonymically, of the Hennebeau and Gre´goire families, pairs an omnivorous and voracious gullet with an eternal source of food. Aside from the ever-hungry mine, on the human level, there are countable objects, whole objects, masses and mounds of flesh: in the famous lunch, the characters eat oysters, trout, and partridges, all countable, mounds of eggs, and charlotte aux pommes. Their system is marked by abundance, plethora, excess, and redundancy: why should they need so many kinds of animal protein to survive, when one would do? Simply, their system is not marked as one in which food is eaten for survival, for that is a given, never to be brought up and never to be put into question. For them, food is part of the ordered system in which the only lacks are due to the vagaries of the market or the problems caused by the rowdy crowds preventing them from getting what is ‘‘rightfully’’ theirs. There are no leftover coffee grounds for them, even as the system is marked by a servant to pour coffee. For the rich, food, which is easily acquired and consumed, has a surface value of sustenance, but its interest does not lie there. Rather, it lies in the surplus value of taste, rareness, and exquisite flavor; a brioche instead of ordinary daily bread brings about no revolutionary thoughts; even the servants share the pleasure of those sated with both food and power: ‘‘They finally sat down; the steam arose from the hot chocolate in their bowls; for a long time, they talked only of the brioche. Me´lanie and Honorine stayed, gave details about the baking, watched them stuff the food through their greasy lips, while saying that it was a pleasure to make a cake when one saw one’s masters so willingly eat it.’’139 The hunger pang or, as one says in French, the creux, literally the hollow, is a momentary gap, ever fillable, so there is no need to worry, no need to count out portions, dividing by the number of mouths. There will always be food; it is its surplus, its added value, and its fulfillment of the code of abundance that count. Such is the role of food in a bourgeois consumer society. In a society in which food is scarce, the matter is completely different. There is no real construction of an ordered system on a regular basis, though the country fair here and the wedding banquet in L’Assommoir are exceptions to the usual, daily, habitual model. Even money, the medium of capitalist exchange, does not always function as it does in the bourgeois model; in its stead, there is a system of barter with others, with oneself, a practice of

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gleaning or of receiving material alms, and of making ends meet that temporarily defers the creux. But the creux is always there: the grains, vermicelli, soups, stews, and generic fried food consumed on a regular basis signify neither the dishes, their preparation, nor even the original ingredients. Rather, they underline the continued presence of this creux as they pass through it, temporary stopgaps or momentary deferrals or delays of the hunger pangs that are the true index of the food of the poor. In the cuisine du pauvre, food signifies this gap over and over. For the poor, the different dynamic of food and hunger changes the descriptions or dispositions of food. Food for the poor is always already broken down, and there is not even ‘‘a crust of bread’’ remaining.140 Bread is already its abject leftovers, neither the dough that would become a brioche in the hands of a servant to the bourgeoisie nor that Hapsburg-Cape´tien bread beyond bread, but its aftermath, its leftovers, which, though able to provide sustenance, are always the faded future of a pathetic past: ‘‘Jeanlin had gathered the breadcrumbs and was soaking them, as if making a soup.’’141 Food here is first and foremost its absence: an empty larder, death from famine, a sterile land crying out for food, and a population that is eternally hungry: ‘‘And La Maheude continued in a sad voice, her head immobile, as she closed her eyes for several instants under the sad clarity of the candle. She said that the larder was empty, the kids were asking for bread, they even had no coffee left, and the water produced colic and the long days spent cheating hunger with boiled cabbage leaves.’’142 Underlined by the repetitive, habitual aspect of the imperfect and the atemporal nature of the present participle, the anaphoric, though irregular sequence of the repeated ‘‘ands’’ turns hunger into a litany marked as a repetition: this is neither the first nor the last time that this will occur in the lives of these people or those similar to them. Moreover, hunger is invoked ludically, even at the expense of material and corporeal needs: fooling hunger with one of the bases for slaking it could, in its delaying tactics, be a quondam solution, if only it were possible. The absence is generalized as hunger meets hunger: ‘‘Was it necessary to die from hunger?’’143 And the countryside itself, metonym of its denizens, screams out from its hunger pangs: Despite the cleanliness, an odor of cooked onions, trapped since the previous day, poisoned the warm air, that heavy air always full of the bitterness of coal. In front of the open cabinet, Catherine was deep in thought. There was only a bit of bread, enough white cheese, but hardly a bit of butter; and she had to make sandwiches for the four of them. Finally she decided, cut the

Flaubert and Zola: Challenges to Verisimilitude 115 slices, took one that she covered with cheese, rubbed another with butter, then glued them together: it was the miner’s lunch, the sandwich taken to the hole each day.144

Meted out, counted, and divided, the food of the poor is marked as well by its destination: not intended to be eaten as a meal, it is rather the means by which energy, albeit as minimal as possible, is given to further the work for the bosses who themselves idly and luxuriously enjoy meals of excess. Again, the creux is marked by the false possibilities of satiety and even the mathematical approach to food differs between rich and poor. While the rich can add foodstuffs up or create uncountable mounds, for the poor, food is divisible or even always already divided into its remainders. A piece of bread is good in that it can be divided once, twice, or more. Soup is good in that it can be endlessly attenuated, yet this has a hidden, deadly irony: whereas a mound of eggs with truffles signifies luxury,145 the more soup there is, the less there really is. Increasing liquid anywhere, even symbolically, extinguishes life: ‘‘A whistling noise of steam made her turn around. Catherine closed things, hastened to run over: the water was boiling and was spreading, putting out the fire. There was no more coffee; she had to be content to pour the water over the coffee grounds from the day before; she added brown sugar to the coffee pot.’’146 The watery soup and coffee announce the death by water that is to come, but they also hasten that death now by drowning the solids, dissolving them, and extinguishing the thermodynamic fire that means energy. Zola even ironizes about water: ‘‘Everyone swallowed their soup with a big gulp of fresh water, that good clear drink for the end of the pay period.’’147 Already in the first chapter of the novel, Zola’s cuisine du pauvre is broken down into its component parts, an always already lingering abject translation of food into chyme and the edible parts that, seemingly having nourished, remain or resign themselves in a parody of food and hunger. And this brings us to another food substance, vermicelli. These noodles are an exemplary version of the food of the poor. Endlessly staving off the hunger of the children at the beginning of the novel, these noodles, etymologically recalling little worms, are also the thinnest form of pasta, likely to dissolve if overcooked. This is not the wheat of Hugo’s ‘‘Boo¨z endormi.’’148 These are not the noodles of Balzac’s Goriot, the noodle maker made good who could capitalize on his formless product and who could produce two daughters ejusdem farinae; his flour was productive, whereas the flour product of Germinal is not. Zola’s noodles fade out; there are never enough to feed all and

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sate everyone’s hunger. Held in reserve, they can serve for a moment but will not produce much. In the second book of Germinal, flour and water, cooked in parallel in two different households, are put to different uses. One is an anabolic use of the material, the other catabolic, if not less nutritive still. Madame Gre´goire’s cook can infuse flour and water with air and life, the yeast will make the dough rise, the eggs will make it rich; the brioche will be worth waiting for. As the dough is ready,149 the cook need only make the brioche. From a paˆte that rises, in which even the air is spiritually nutritious, there is a long distance to the evanescent paˆtes that are scarcely there. With the noodles, nothing is ready; the characters have to wait to eat, and even then, there is nothing to sustain them; the noodles are about to collapse as they are divided. For the poor, eating is always already over, an evenemential passe´ simple contrasted with the pregnant future of food for the bourgeoisie. The irony is palpable: the bourgeois do not have to wait for food, for it is always there and always will be; the poor have to wait for food, for it has always already been consumed, and there may very well be none in the future. For the poor, if by chance there is something today, tomorrow there will be nothing. Having food means having had it and remarking its finitude: [La Maheude] had closed the doors, stirred the fire, put more coal on. Her hope was that the old man had not swallowed all the soup. But she found the wiped frying pan; she cooked a handful of vermicelle that she had been keeping for three days. They’d eat it with water, without butter; there had to be nothing left of the bit of butter of the day before. She was astonished to discover that, in preparing the sandwiches, Catherine, miraculously, had left a bit of butter the size of a walnut. But this time, the cupboard was empty: nothing, not even a bit of bread, nothing on hand, not even a bone to gnaw on.150

So even if Catherine has left a bit of the butter, the miracle is only one in a kind of momentary elation expressed by discours indirect libre; there are no loaves and fishes in this miracle. Zola makes the butter disappear by rendering it as nonmiraculous as possible; it is a false idol or a mirage: there is nothing to eat and even the presence of the butter and the noodles mark that incontrovertible fact. When it is time to eat, fittingly, the noodles are not for La Maheude. The miracle has turned into Christian self-sacrifice. And the telltale coffee, that initial sign of the absence, the attenuation, the abject, and the aqueous, reappears to reconfirm the liquidation of food: ‘‘When Alzire and the children were there, she divided the vermicelli

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among three little plates. She said that she was not hungry. And though Catherine had already put more water on the coffee grounds of the previous day, she did it again and swallowed two big mugs of a coffee that was so clear that it resembled rusty water.’’151 Not only is the coffee used and reused, it is also compared to rust, a result of decay. Once again, the solid has given way; the action of the liquid makes the solid waste away, rot, and corruptly collapse into uncountable minuscule pieces. With two exceptions, solids exist only to be melted or broken down, dissolved into some liquid state; it is a wet world that pretends to be food but that is truly only nonnourishing ersatz. If the coffee grounds and the vermicelli signal dearth, there are, nevertheless, two star dishes of this cuisine, if we can even say that: soup and ratatouille. Not late-summer, Mediterranean comfort food, this ratatouille is a banal dish, thicker than soup, but not by much. The apotheosis of the ratatouille will be the thickened dishes such as stews and ragouts whose substance gives sustenance. But the discourse of this food is modified in the paired descriptions that follow. The first, given in discours indirect libre, offers La Maheude’s reflective meditation on the food to be, based on money she hopes for but does not yet have in hand: ‘‘While walking, she was already spending the hundred sous: first bread, then coffee; then a quarter-pound of butter, a bushel of potates for the morning soup and the evening stew; finally, maybe a bit of head cheese, for the father needed meat.’’152 Liquid still dominates and even overwhelms the bits of solid that she hopes to purchase. When she returns, having obtained not only the food she sought but some money as well that Maigrat the grocer has lent her,153 the discourse changes a bit as the illusion of the money, as if it were tangible, produces solids: ‘‘We shall have bread through Saturday, and the best is that he lent me one hundred sous . . . I also got butter, coffee, and chicory at his store; I was going to get deli meats and potatoes, when I saw he was grumbling . . . Seven sous of head cheese, eighteen sous of potatoes; I still have three and three-quarter francs for a stew and a soup.’’154 The money, the possibility of exchange, and the belief that the money is hers even though it is not cause her to speculate, something that, as David Bell has shown, is a fundamental figure at work in Les Rougon-Macquart.155 La Maheude literally speculates on solid food or on something more solid than the watery soup: a real stew and a real soup, certainly no longer the cuisine du pauvre. Speculation allows la Maheude to move mentally from the cuisine du pauvre to respectable, simple cuisine paysanne. Even the once-attenuated coffee has been reversed by this illusion of solidity: ‘‘The potatoes were done, the

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coffee thickened by a bunch of chicory; it was being filtered and sang its noise in big drops.’’156 And yet, in carefully orchestrating his scenario of illusion, Zola ironizes the will to solidity. The novel needs to release and dissolve; without a second thought, Zola opts for a diuretic, as la Maheude says to Jeanlin, ‘‘Go gather a bunch of dandelions for tonight.’’157 Certainly, like gleanings, the dandelions are available for free. And yet one cannot help thinking that the choice of foodstuff, whose French name—pissenlit—marks that act of micturation, is a sign that things will soon redissolve into liquid. As the salad never appears, so one might assume that, for the moment, the characters can keep nutrients in. But even after the richest meal of the poor, that at the country fair, there is a quick outflow of ‘‘beer, with which he could fill himself with no other problem than pissing it out too fast, drop by drop, as clear as spring water.’’158 That the urine is clear means that nothing has been processed from the meal, no energy assimilated from the protein, because there has been no nitrogenous waste formed to be excreted in it. This dissipation is not only a liquefaction, but also a sublimation, both psychological and chemical.159 Psychologically, it is a way of not remembering hunger and of believing that the pangs are not there. It is a repression that marks the subject in a way that rationalizes a course of action or a thought. The general state of food matter in this novel is a liquid, an abject version thereof, or its attenuated abject water, like the rusty water already discussed. The ratatouille, the soup, and the vermicelli are attempts at solidity, but they can never get there. The potatoes purchased the day one has money and the bit of head cheese made from odd pieces of pork held together with solidified fat and gelatin are the only real moves toward solidity, that solidity of food illustrated by the simplicity of cuisine paysanne, and a fortiori, by cuisine bourgeoise, the cuisine of abundance. But the head cheese and potatoes are ephemera and the poor are soon back to meatless meals. If the process of solid to liquid to gas is sequentially here one of a logical order of cooking, even if it marks only that momentary solidity, it is the transformation of that solid into gas—the odor of fried onion—that is the rhetorical or meteorological sublimation at work. As a reminder of the food that no longer exists, the food that has been liquefied, that odor of fried onion is a sign of a past: a sign that there once was food. As a lingering signifier, marking both an absent signified and an absent object, the odor of fried onion is a haunting reminder of the abject. It sits somewhere between sign and object in a world that is abject when everything tends to disappear, melt, or sublimate. Wafting through the air, the odor of onion impregnates the space with the absences it marks. This role is given the gaseous sign,

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which spreads to fill and mark the space permanently as a space of lack and want; it reminds readers that the space is always moving toward its inscription in absence. Even when there is food to cook and even when cooking occurs, the food is resolved or summarized in that odor. It is the fulfillment of the marc de la veille; it is the essence, as Zola says, of the cuisine du pauvre: A salad would work well with the stew that was simmering on the fire, potatoes, leeks, sorrel, all saute´ed with fried onion! The whole house smelled of fried onion. That good odor that rots so quickly and that penetrates the bricks of the miners’ houses with a poison such that you can smell them from afar in the country, because of that violent smell of the cooking of the poor.160

But if the odor of the fried onion is a good one when there is food, it soon turns rancid. And its disappearance is even worse, leaving only the musty odor of caves or ‘‘holes in which nothing lives.’’161 Like other things, or perhaps leading the way as the Zolian mechanization takes over of the text, good quickly goes bad.162 All these foods of the earth—onions, potatoes, sorrel, leeks—release their sulfurous essence. In no time, the goodness that nourishes turns rancid. And rancidity, on the edge of the edible, finally becomes a haunting poison that will not recede. That conversion, in the space of one sentence, marks the turn from the scarcity of food to its absence. It is a sentence that moves from the ubiquity of that odor to ‘‘the violent smell of the cooking of the poor.’’ Odor becomes an aroma (fumet), which is normally a reduction or essence, the basis for the master sauces of haute cuisine. Here it is negative, and that essence of the food of the poor remarks all solid space with itself, penetrating violently: no wonder the fumet is said to be violent. It represents the eternal hunger of the poor and redistributes space according to its own laws of penetration, as it fills space and solids with its own negativity. One would have thought the solidity of a banquet would be at the opposite pole from the evanescence, penetration, and violent poison of the fried onion. And this in spite of the fact that readers of Zola know that his banquet scenes are often a sign of some disaster and destruction to come, a secular and poor version of a some lay last supper. Seemingly happy, the celebrants will soon meet their fate; the companionship symbolized by the sharing of bread and wine will become a dissolution of itself. Solid food and solid bonds will collapse. Already, as the banquet is announced, the atmosphere of celebration is tinged with a struggle of odors between what is always there and some theatricalized version of material wealth: ‘‘And from

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one end of the walls to the other, it smelled of rabbit, an odor of the cooking of the rich, one that fought the inveterate odor of onion fried that day.’’163 Compared to the dinners of the rich that are marked by the visual and the material, the poor version of the banquet is marked by a noxious odor. And the odor of the onions will win in the end. Then there is the rabbit itself or what it has become. In the cuisine of the rich, the material and visual aspects of food correspond to one another: the oysters that should have come, the pigeons that one sees, the partridges that are presented, and the trout that appear. The only exception to the solidity of the food of the rich seems to be a singular odor, that of pineapple, which pleasantly permeates the room, yet the pineapple is visible in a crystal bowl. It is the exoticism of the fruit that is at work in this exception: something to be admired in and of itself, with an exquisite and exotic rarity. But in general, food for the rich is visible, eternal, moving toward that future of itself, endlessly replenishable unless, by some unfortunate coincidence, the poor appear to upset the proverbial applecart: ‘‘You will excuse me. I wanted to offer you oysters . . . You know that they come into Marchiennes from Ostend on Mondays, and I had thought of sending the cook with the carriage . . . But she was afraid of being stoned.’’164 The only thing preventing the certain future of the food of the rich is the penetration of the food of the poor, the reversal of sublimation as the odor of the fried onion is turned into a weapon. Let us return to the country fair to examine one of the last two important figures of the food of the poor. Significantly, Zola structures the description so as to turn the solids immediately awry: In addition to the rabbit with potatoes that they had fattened up in its hutch for a month, they had a rich soup and beef. They had just been paid for the last two weeks the day before. No one remembered such a feast. Even on the last St. Barbe’s day, that miners’ holiday where they do nothing for three days, the rabbit had not been so plum or tender. Thus the ten pairs of jaws, from little Estelle, whose teeth were just beginning to come in, to old Bonnemort, who was losing his, worked with such vigor that the bones themselves disappeared. Meat was good; but they digested it badly, as they saw it so rarely. Everything disappeared; there was just a bit of boiled beef for the evening. They could add slices of bread if they were hungry.165

The scene is duly famous. Suffice it to say that everything points not only to the consumption of the rabbit, but also to that future moment that recalls

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the past, a moment of hunger. Food is just a temporary truce between moments of permanent hunger. Beyond that, the fundamental ingredient of the cuisine of the rich, meat, the foundation of solidity, is excessive here. Are we better off without meat? It is not at all sure. And as with the question of the brioche, recalling Marie-Antoinette, digestion or indigestion relates to the political: ‘‘Badly digested readings came back to him, examples of people who had burnt their cities to stop the enemy. . . . Men would let themselves die of starvation rather than eat the bread of tyrants.’’166 Meat, that ultimately foreign substance of which there is never enough or always too much, turns into the ambiguous figure of food: protein and fat, both of which are badly digested by those who do not have enough of those food groups on a regular basis. As there is never enough meat for proper sustenance, when it is present, it cannot be dealt with. Meat becomes an abject dish for those used to the cuisine du pauvre, one that can be eaten only when diluted by quantities of water that will make it pass. Whole and undiluted, it seems to provoke a reaction on the part of the eaters, who can no longer distinguish between what is edible (the meat, theoretically) and what is not edible (the bones). The banquet is a turning point, a moment of commensurality that turns into its own undoing. This is not to say that the banquet is inherently problematic, though Zola does lead the characters to excess in a prediction of the devastation to come: ‘‘And there were long moments of silence; the crowd was drinking, stuffing itself without a sound, a silent indigestion of beer and fried potatoes was growing in the heat that the frying pans, boiling in the open, increased as well.’’167 Food will change its semioticity from a world of sustenance to a world of the indigestible. Thus will the elements of the banquet return much later, when the workers are starving, and when food will have fulfilled its role of being almost a poison: ‘‘The women had seen the kitchen, and they spewed a storm of invective against the pheasant that was roasting, against the sauces whose rich odor ravaged their empty stomachs. Oh, those bourgeois bastards: we’ll force champagne and truffles down their throats so we can bust a gut.’’168 The odor, the fat, and the meat, all of which have led earlier toward dissolution, become associated with violence and explosions for the individual, the verb ‘‘peˆter’’ meaning both ‘‘to fart’’ and ‘‘to explode.’’ Thus will food be fantasized, as the miners, perhaps fading away from starvation, will explode exactly as the explosion in the mine itself will realize the destruction of the means of exploitation. If the miners no longer have food, they will be food, but they will be poisonous, exploding in the mine.169

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The abject does return before that final explosion in the heavily theatricalized death of Maigrat. The event is set against a basso ostinato, a borborygmus or growling of the stomachs of the poor, a chanted refrain emanating from their empty bowels, pushing under the esophagus, as the stomachs speak ventriloquially, ‘‘bread, bread, bread’’ (du pain, du pain, du pain).170 I shall not dwell on the construction of the event but merely focus on the final incarnation of food/non-food. As the miners will become the final food for the mine, so does Maigrat stand for food, but in a relation of the abject, the inedible, and the complete destruction of any paradigm or pattern: La Mouquette was already stripping him. She pulled down his pants while la Levaque raised his legs. And la Bruˆle´, with the dry hands of an old woman, spread his naked thighs and grabbed that dead virility. She held it all, pulling on it with an effort that made her spine stand out and made her big arms crack. The soft skin resisted. She had to start again. In the end, she pulled off the bit of flesh, a package of hairy, bloody flesh.171

Ripped from its body, sign of manhood, life, and abuse, Maigrat’s genitals are that symbolic bit of flesh, like all other meat that might be suitable for a carnivore or the omnivores that we all are, and there is at least the implication that we are all potentially cannibals. Already, in a simple, symbolic movement, la Maheude forces the dead Maigrat into eating the abject dirt from the ground, to which he is likened; this act underlines his lack of humanity and his fundamental otherness.172 Eating nonfood, the dead Maigrat is now different from them. If he was a cannibal—la Maheude accuses him of having eaten them—they will not be like him. And moreover from eating the same—human flesh—he passes in death to eating the wholly other. Much later, reduced to abjection themselves, E´tienne and Catherine will, in their last desperate efforts, eat wood after the mining disaster; the dead will eat the dead. So what has la Mouquette ripped off ? In what category does it fall, food or nonfood, flesh or nonflesh, meat or human flesh? Everything collapses, for no categories will work: ‘‘Drops of blood poured down, that lamentable bit of flesh hung there, like a scarp of meat at a butcher’s stall.’’173 Caught between solid and liquid, between what is accepted and what is rejected, that scrap of meat not even fit for a dog, just hangs there. Maigrat has become what they all become, one way or another in this novel, tatters of the human: ‘‘What is hanging on the end of that stick?’’ asked Ce´cile, who had been brave enough to look.

Flaubert and Zola: Challenges to Verisimilitude 123 Lucie and Jeanne declarered that it had to be a rabbit’s skin. ‘‘No, no,’’ murmured Madame Hennebeau, ‘‘they must have raided the delicatessen; it looks like a bit of pork.’’174

Of course it is leftover debris of pork, a piece of a pig; that goes without saying. But it is so much more. And ever so much less. In Germinal, Zola has created a poetics and a rhetoric of the cuisine du pauvre; they structure the novel around emptiness and hunger, just as mining depends on the production of emptiness. But coal seems an endless resource: as hollows are created by emptying the veins, new mines can be explored and new lodes appear. Expendable of course are the workers, yesterday’s coffee grounds for the bourgeoisie, to be used and used up, replaceable by others, by today’s coffee grounds and those of an endless series of tomorrows.

3.

Colette and Proust: Queering Modernism

Colette and Androcentrism Despite serious differences in approaching narrative between the mainstream novelists of the nineteenth century and the high modernists of the early twentieth century and even the young Sartre who will follow them, there remains a seeming allegiance to verisimilitude and a reasoned, logical approach to narrative. Many nineteenth-century authors try to reproduce reality through an objective approach; early twentieth-century narratives, ushered in by the publication of Andre´ Gide’s work L’Immoraliste, take a more subjective approach, whether it is through the use of a first-person narrator or through the imposition of a third-person narrator who does not pretend to be the universal and omniscient narrator central to realist narrative. Still, the reduced point of view makes claims to the possibility of depicting the truth, when there is still the belief in a grand narrative, as there is for Proust and, to a lesser extent, Colette, whose challenge to grand narrative is based on a challenge to androcentrism.1 And even when there is no belief in absolutes, as for Sartre, the early narratives are an attempt to construct the truth through action and the imposition of meaning on what he will eventually classify under the category of the absurd. As much as Andre´ Gide once seemed central to the development of the modernist canon, as Proust’s star has risen, Gide’s importance seems to have diminished, his place taken over to some extent by Colette. What once appeared revolutionary in Gide’s confessional mode may seem less exciting today, depending on the reader’s perspective, and the formal inventions of modernism, such as the narrative techniques displayed in Les Faux-monnayeurs, seem also to be more clever than revolutionary when faced with the worlds that Proust and Colette created. In specific, Proust and Colette unbalance gender lines and sexual orientations in a far more problematic way than Gide does. If, in his confessional mode, Gide is more revealing about his own personal inclinations than either of the other two authors—and this 124

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despite his caveat about never saying ‘‘I’’—he never turns his personal proclivities into a problematizing of the text and narrative. Proust and Colette may not be ‘‘out’’ the way Gide is in his confessional works, but their narratives are ultimately far more queer than his. In this chapter then, I shall examine some aspects of the writing of Colette and Proust that take on questions of queering narrative through gender bending. These approaches will not be exhaustive studies, but rather will focus on singular problematics that relate to the ways narrative is constructed through an articulation of gender. At the same time, the subjects on which I shall focus are essential to comprehending the ways in which each author understands how the representation of gender and the possibilities of verisimilitude intersect and how each has an effect on the other. Both Colette and Proust go beyond the normative position that Gide maintains through his writing, with the possible exception of various ‘‘queer’’ moments in Les Caves du Vatican, as opposed to the confessional modes in Si le grain ne meurt and other related works. Since Colette’s writing began to receive major critical attention through a reconsideration of the modernist canon and an impetus derived from the increasing presence of feminist studies in U.S. universities in particular, her work has predominantly been viewed as gynocentric. Critical emphasis has been placed on her constructions, depictions, and representations of women and the feminine in general. Starting with the Claudine series and continuing through much of the writing that followed, Colette’s protagonists are almost invariably women, and her explorations of the feminine sit at the heart of her writing. The one salient exception to Colette’s gynocentrism is Che´ri, with its very belated and much weaker sequel, La Fin de Che´ri. Colette portrays a protagonist in a work in which women—the protagonist’s older lover Le´a and his rather monstrous mother, Madame Peloux—occupy secondary or reactive (as opposed to proactive) roles. While for Kristeva, the appearance of monstrosity in Colette’s work dates from a bit later and continues through the thirties, whereas Che´ri belongs to the era of ‘‘transgressive sexuality’’ that includes both La Maison de Claudine and Le Ble´ en herbe,2 I believe that there are already elements of the future monstrosity, especially as figured in Madame Peloux and her son, Che´ri. To create these monstrous figures, especially Che´ri, Colette does not engage a phallocentric discourse or an androcentric model but continues to explore the feminine as primary. In the character of Che´ri, she creates a masculine, heterosexual, and heterocentric male but one in whom the feminine is central to the construction of the masculine; that heterosexuality will itself be put into deep question in

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critical scenes involving Che´ri’s friend Desmond. But from the very beginning of the novel, starting with a sensual scene in which the eponymous hero seeks to wear a pearl necklace that belongs to his lover, Le´a, Colette questions the validity of androcentrism and shows that Che´ri’s masculinity is a femininity onto which a swaggering machismo has been uncomfortably and artificially grafted. Che´ri wears that masculinity as a mask that incompletely hides his feminine, womanly, or even (non-sexually) queer nature. In short, the author presents a masculinity that depends on apposition, prosthesis, and masquerade.3 As readers know, in psychoanalytical models, genders and sexes depend on a phallocentric organization and disposition of the sexes, with the ‘‘second sex’’ implicitly derived from the first and any gender bending perceived as a failure to self-actualize. Yet we do not necessarily need recourse to psychoanalysis to understand what is at work here. In a general sense, this is part of Colette’s habitual approach. For this is not the first critique of androcentrism in Colette’s work, and as Juliette Rogers, among others, shows, Colette critiques androcentrism and patriarchy in Claudine a` l’e´cole and La Naissance du jour by creating a gendered gynocentric collective.4 Here, however, the author is taking a revolutionary approach in which even a cursory reading of Che´ri offers three initial critiques of androcentrism. First, there is a critique of the bourgeois family, its propagation, and its metonyms in the state and its ideologies. In this novel, Colette depicts a family model that is decidedly not bourgeois, and while it is certainly not actively ‘‘antibourgeois,’’ depending as it does on the class structure and on money, it is still based on propagation outside the conventions of bourgeois marriage. Second, the model is one of fluidity and not of polarization: masculinity and femininity or men and women are not absolutely separated; barriers between the two are seemingly permeable. Third, to return briefly to psychoanalysis for one specific point, the position of absolute knowledge assigned to the nom/non du pe`re by Lacan is replaced by a less than absolute nom/non de la me`re, incarnate in the somewhat monstrous, albeit carnivalesquely so, figure of Madame Peloux. In fact, referring specifically to Freud and not to Lacan, Kristeva puns on ‘‘pe`re-version’’ and ‘‘me`re-version,’’5 and we could easily place the entire novel under the sign of the perverse mother. Yet at the same time, Madame Peloux is never fully feared and always somewhat mocked because the model is not an absolute one of castration and castration anxiety. Despite her attempts to assert authority, she turns her son into the phallus instead of letting him strive endlessly and unsuccessfully to obtain it or become in turn the nom du pe`re for some future scion.6

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With that in mind, we should turn to the basic structure of the novel, for Colette pointedly creates a version of the progress narrative, each part of which has a polemical point to convey to her readers. The narrative is structured as a suite of five movements, each of which contributes to our understanding of Che´ri’s artifices of masculinity. The first movement is a spectacular scene between Che´ri and Le´a, a courtesan who is a long-time friend of the ‘‘family’’ and a contemporary of Che´ri’s mother. The second is a flashback to Che´ri’s childhood and adolescence designed to explain his current existence. The next is the introduction of normativity with Che´ri courting his future wife, Edme´e; needless to say, the model of bourgeois marriage will fail, given all the monstrosity that Colette has already paraded before her readers. The fourth movement is the carnivalesque, antiphonal, and basically queer model of a friendship between Che´ri and his friend Desmond. And finally, we return to a scene in which Che´ri and Le´a are together again, but one in which happiness is certainly not around the corner. Although this appears to be a verisimilar narrative, Colette refuses to imbue her text with absolute causality, genetics, and logical consequences and prefers to favor the fluidity already mentioned and a jouissance always available and never lacking.7 In a different way from Flaubert, she inflects the expected Balzacian determinism that uses the past absolutely to explain the present and future by means of flashbacks. Resolutely antideterministic, Colette structures the flashback to create a gamut of possibilities out of which a specific masculinity will emerge that is not totally a logically predictable one, for it depends not on structures, but on jouissance. Based on the failed structuring of his childhood as psychogenesis, the author offers a sea of possibilities for Che´ri’s masculinity rather than determining a bourgeois, post-Oedipal figure endlessly deprived of the phallus and thus permanently needing to dominate women in order to think that he has attained the phallic position. Shortly before turning to the flashback, Colette presents the apotheosis of Che´ri as a young man about to enter the world of heteronormativity and marriage; he has been prepared for years for this performance of the normal, what, in a very clever turn of phrase, Guy Ducrey calls ‘‘this crucial passage in which a young man must don a husband’s outfit [oripeau]’’;8 as we know, ‘‘oripeau’’ implies falseness and theatricality. Colette presents Che´ri through the implicit point of view of the women who are looking at him, the same women occupying the voyeuristic position of desire as those who made him the man he is today:

128 Colette and Proust: Queering Modernism [Madame Peloux] pointed to Che´ri, who was standing in front of the glass wall and smoking. He held his cigarette holder between his teeth and threw his head back to avoid the smoke. The three women looked at the young man who, head thrown back, eyelids half closed, feet together, and standing still, seemed rather a winged figure, floating and sleeping in the air. . . . Le´a was not fooled at the scared and beaten look in the eyes of the young girl.9

Despite all efforts to produce a man, the women have produced a fallen angel who both seduces and destroys everything and everyone around him. At the same time, Che´ri seems to be performing his masculinity rather than inhabiting it as a self-fulfilling phallocratic attitude that, perversely, requires the lack in and of the other to operate. The women who have created him know implicitly that he will not fit into the normative world defined by a primary maleness. Che´ri’s figuration as angelic male places him as the phallic presence that can never be grasped, internalized, or captured by any real bourgeois woman in order to create a lack within maleness and masculinity. Complete unto himself, Che´ri is a narcissist, solipsist, and egotist who will be able to conquer women of the heteronormative bourgeois world but who will not be able to conquer their system; his maleness and masculinity will convince those who have an implicit or explicit queer relation to that existence.10 Significantly, Edme´e is a bachelie`re; as an educated woman, she is the metonym of the economic, social, power, and value system of the bourgeois state and in complete opposition to Che´ri who cannot be tamed by the order of canonicity; she is, as Joubert reminds us, one of the figures with a ‘‘thirst for social affirmation.’’11 This final description before the flashback is the result of recalcitrance to the system that we read in Che´ri’s formation, in Che´ri’s becoming Che´ri: simple Fred transformed by women’s desires and his desirability into ‘‘Che´ri,’’ the beloved, the dear, and the incarnation of desire and the phallus onto whom all women’s desire (and that of some men) is cathected. There is no sujet suppose´ savoir; there is no father, as his position has been occupied by the name of the mother whose ‘‘no’’ will be weak and vacillating. From the first, Che´ri’s formation, which is essentially the production of his masculinity, is tied to his incarnation of beauty: Le´a remembered Che´ri as a child, a marvel with long curls. When he was very young, he was not yet called Che´ri, but only Fred. At times forgotten, at other times adored, Che´ri grew up among faded maids and lanky valets. Although his birth had mysteriously brought along

Colette and Proust: Queering Modernism 129 opulence, there was no miss, no Fra¨ulein, with him, who was loudly protected from ‘‘those ghouls.’’12

Thus does Che´ri’s kernel of being start with a perceived, almost classical or Renaissance beauty typical of the catamite or kouros. The long curly hair, classical sign of effeminacy, is not tied to a future homosexuality but to a future as the cynosure for all female eyes and as the product of the nonbourgeois structuring of his being by his mother.13 Moreover, typical superego figures, such as the pristine, virginal, and foreign other, are not hired to curb the implicit or explicit lust in the being of Fred who will become Che´ri. Che´ri’s coming to being does not depend on a continuous monitoring by a parent or surrogate but on the intermittence of authority that will be figured as a self-defined freedom and capriciousness to be the person he feels he wants to be at any given moment. Hence, his existence as Che´ri will depend less on an internalization of parental—and therefore by definition, masculist—authority than on his own self-reflective will. Childhood becomes the extension of the absence of superego, a reign of anarchy that is also a repeated crossing of class lines, a movement that is unacceptable within the bourgeois structure in which he should be participating: ‘‘Che´ri knew all the joys of a wild childhood. Still lisping, he collected the low rumors of the stage. He shared in secret dinners in the kitchen. He had milkbaths scented with orris root in his mother’s bathtub, and quick clean-ups with the corner of a towel.’’14 No haunting by the power and weight of the past or of some collective unconscious transmitted in the mechanisms of knowledge and power will interfere with Che´ri’s solipsistic and idiopathic masculinity. From the very beginning of his existence then, as defined through the first moment of the flashback, Che´ri’s organization of his being will depend on the internalized image of adoration by the other rather than on the internalization of the censure of the father. At the heart of his masculinity is the desire of the woman for him: no lack, but excess. Feeble attempts to form his coming-to-being along more traditional lines fail: Madame Peloux cannot bring herself to mold her son according to the rules. By the time Che´ri reaches the age of reason, anarchy, recalcitrance, egotism, and narcissism have usurped the place of order. The author ironically introduces, albeit fleetingly, the negative image of castrated masculinity in the form of an abbe´, who is the negation both of Che´ri’s budding masculinity and of Madame Peloux’s very existence: ‘‘About the same time, Madame Peloux imposed a priest-tutor on her son, whom she let go at the end of ten months, ‘because,’ she admitted, ‘that black frock that I saw everywhere in the house made me think that I had taken in a poor relative, and

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Lord knows there is nothing sadder than a poor relative in one’s home.’ ’’15 Although an abbe´ technically has not taken a vow of chastity, the implicit comparison is between the abbe´ and a poor relation, inevitably categorized by Balzac, as we have seen, as an individual not fitting the reproductive model. If the abbe´ is dismissed and has not had lasting or damaging effect on Fred, the latter’s developing masculinity is resistant to the castrating mechanisms of church and state. Aided and abetted by his doting mother, Che´ri is the negative of the figure that she briefly thought might impose authority and order on him. Against his chastity and implicit castration, Che´ri always remains the figure of jouissance; against the blackness and bleakness of the intruder’s outfit will be the hued or white joie de vivre of the radiant hedonist that is Che´ri.16 Colette’s representation of Che´ri’s masculinity is thus a kind of inversion of Lacanian phallocentrism. In standard Lacanian discourse, the man has the phallus and the woman is the phallus; the lack, the desire to fill the lack, both of which are met with the non/nom du pe`re, produce the constructs of the symbolic and the imaginary for the individual (male) subject. Lacan’s model depends on an elaboration of the already phallocentric Oedipal crisis that according to psychoanalysis provides a structure for signification of the male individual that involves symbolic castration and repression. For Lacan, the figuration of a kind of manque a` l’eˆtre that is essentially the absence of absolute knowledge, absolute power, the phallus, the Signifier with a capital ‘‘S,’’ the structuring of basic female signification and desire, and the formation of the symbolic and the imaginary for the female come, within both the Freudian and Lacanian models, as derivative of and secondary to phallocentrism and the primacy of the male. Madame Peloux’s doting on her son is matched by a proclivity toward anarchy and independence, part of Che´ri’s nature or a product of the foundational logic in which the gynocentric model allows him structurally and behaviorally to follow his own whims. Double or parthenogenetic clone of his mother, albeit in a male mode, Che´ri resists all pressure to make him conform, even when that pressure, unrelentingly at this point, comes from his mother: ‘‘When he was fourteen, Che´ri tried school. He didn’t believe in it. He opposed any prison and escaped. Not only did Madame Peloux find the energy to incarcerate him again, but also, faced with the tears and insults of her son, ran away, her hands covering her ears.’’17 Madame Peloux will not hear—cannot listen to—the mixture of typically feminine tears and typically masculine cursing; more importantly, she flees in the face of the male monster she has created. Later, this teratology will be underlined in

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Le´a’s musings. Not only is Che´ri not suited for the rituals and institutions of bourgeois society, he is also unknowable and therefore, arguably, not human: ‘‘Marry Che´ri? . . . It is not possible, not . . . human . . . To give a young girl to Che´ri? Might as well throw her to the wolves. People don’t know what Che´ri is.’’18 Thus Che´ri will be the male incarnation of his mother’s monstrosity, a consuming raptor of all that falls in his path. If Che´ri starts out as that parthenogenetic clone, when he becomes a man when he has reached puberty, there is an inversion that does produce a phallic model for him: it is a defeminization that turns him into a super-male. Colette is producing what could retrospectively be called a revisionist model (retrospectively because there is a rough synchronicity in production between Freud and Colette here and certainly no real knowledge of psychoanalytical models on the part of Colette): the structuring of both sexes is gynocentric, without however there necessarily being a point of derivation of masculinity from the feminine. Instead of producing a single sex model that splits into two—and in this Freud is oddly retrospective—Colette opines a dualistic model, one however in which there is a fluidity between positions.19 While the structures of society have no effect on him, the homosociality of boarding school, foundational structure for the influence of and the desirability of belonging to a peer group, produces a kind of exaggerated male: ‘‘She thought that Che´ri had grown up too quickly, was too thin and wan. His eyes, his eyes with rings around them [farde´s de cerne], he wore coaches’ outfits, and he spoke more crassly than ever. . . . He stopped working completely, wanted horses, cars, jewels, demanded a generous allowance.’’20 Colette leaves lingering traces of his ontogeny: his eyes that are ‘‘farde´s’’ and his desires mark him as the male version of a kept woman. The creation of Che´ri as Che´ri is not accomplished through castrating mechanisms of Oedipal masculinity but the combination of a foundational gynocentrism coupled with the homosociality that will socialize him into becoming who he is. And it will only be after this period of somewhat anachoretic socialization—a difficult process given his long-term anarchy—that he will get out of the awkward phase and become the peacock who has an affair with his mother’s friend. Until he reblossoms and is reborn, he is the rather pale product of that singular socialization, as, ‘‘at seventeen, he looked like a little old-man, a nit-picking retiree. Still handsome, but thin and short of breath.’’21 Thus when we turn critically to the amazing opening scene in Le´a’s bedroom, it is in full knowledge of the structurings described above and of the

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fact that his behavior as an adult is not fully predictable by his childhood and adolescence. Significantly, Colette leaves a chronological gap between Che´ri’s late adolescence as a haggard seventeen-year old and his glorious emergence as a peacock in his early adulthood. The first real perception of Che´ri in Le´a’s bedroom is marked by his insistence on acquiring something traditionally considered to belong to the realm of the feminine: ‘‘Le´a, give me your pearl necklace! Do you hear me, Le´a? Give me your necklace!’’22 Unfettered by the structures of male-dominated masculinity, Che´ri is less a nineteenth-century dandy, the structures of whose rebellion and effeminacy were based on a male-dominated, phallocentric model, than the first metrosexual. If we consider that metrosexuality is a product of a consumer society in which the target audience is initially the adornment of the feminine (shown so clearly by Zola in Au Bonheur des dames), then Che´ri seeks to adorn his own masculinity as if he were part of that audience. Sign of luxury, wealth, and sensuality, the pearls would go as well with his own masculine existence as they would with Le´a’s more traditional feminine one: ‘‘Why wouldn’t you give me your necklace? It looks as good on me as on you, even better!’’23 Che´ri enters a realm where narcissistic self-reflection and masculinity are not at all socially conditioned by repressive systems and he has determined that the traditional sorting of masculine and feminine accessories does not obtain for him. Although steadfastly male, he moves between polarities, never determinable or markable as fully masculine or feminine: ‘‘All in black, he was dancing in front of the sunlit pink curtains. Like a graceful devil on top of a blaze. But when he backed up to the bed, he turned completely white again, from his silk pajamas to his suede slippers.’’24 Instead of the hard surfaces associated with stereotypical masculinity, there are soft, luxurious, and eroticized fabrics, silk and suede, that, though shared by men and women, still are markedly sensual but not associated here with effeminacy. So his being a man depends as much on the sensuality of his masculinity as it does on the gendered aspects of his existence. Thereafter, Colette is quick to describe him in fully masculine terms, but we already understand how they are inflected as the product of femininity and sensuality, as the result of the feminine ideal of masculine beauty, and as his own conscious or unconscious desire to conform to that sensuality, to preen for the other as he preens for himself. Che´ri cannot willfully transform his image, but like Maupassant’s Georges Duroy in Bel-Ami, he can perform his masculinity as if it were a role in a play: ‘‘He stood in front of a long mirror on the wall between the two windows and contemplated his image of a very handsome

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young man, neither tall nor short, his hair as dark as a blackbird’s feathers. He opened his nightshirt to reveal a dark, hard chest, spread out like a shield, and the same pink sparkle played on his teeth, on the whites of his dark eyes, and on the pearls of the necklace.’’25 In addition to signs associated with what might be considered handsomeness in a man in this society, including the brilliant, glistening blue-black hair, a muscular chest, dark skin, and normal height, Colette marks Che´ri as sparkling—teeth and eyes—and as one with the pearls of the necklace. Che´ri is that necklace: he is opalescent and luminescent; he is the male incarnation of sensuality and sexuality within the realm of the luxuriantly feminine. If Che´ri is usually not aware of his difference from other men, Colette occasionally allows him an insight into it: ‘‘I’m beyond the conventional. I think it is idiotic that a man is allowed to accept a pearl tie-pin from a woman or two for cufflinks but would feel himself dishonored if she gave him fifty.’’26 Significantly, the author translates the sense of adornment into an economic and social order. Che´ri’s objections to the social order can, in a sense, be resumed in his desire to have the same rights that not only a bourgeois woman would have, but also, and more importantly, a courtesan. He wants to have all the rights his mother and Le´a have and he wants to feel free to be bedecked in jewels that he has earned for his male sexual prowess, just as the courtesan has earned hers for her sexual favors and talents. This desire is under the sign of irony: it is not that Che´ri, as a male gigolo servicing unhappy middle-class women, desires to earn money from them. Rather, he desires to earn a reward from Le´a, who is in the business that he would imaginarily wish to be in. The system of exchange of sexual favors for material rewards has to be visited on him as well; he thus would participate in a system of exchange in which he is indirectly and belatedly kept by another man, the person who originally gave the pearls to Le´a. Che´ri is again in a homosocial order: he is queer (not homosexual, at least not at the moment) parading as a heterosexual man playing a female courtesan. And the more he plays that role, the more the roles are reversed. Her necklace becomes a hope, a means of prayer for a past that will never return for her, but which is becoming more and more incarnate in him: ‘‘She rolled her necklace that had been thrown on the bed around her fingers as if it were a rosary. She now left him at night, for, in love with beautiful pearls that he caressed in the morning, Che´ri would have noticed too often that Le´a’s neck, thicker than before, was losing its whiteness, and showed flaccid muscles beneath the skin.’’27 Typical gender roles are reversed as he loves the pearls and as she has muscles, albeit flaccid ones.

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Nothing here is completely black or white; Che´ri shares characteristics with men formed by the Oedipal, phallic, and castrating model of bourgeois society that insists on accumulation and territoriality: ‘‘She went back to bed, lay on her back, and noticed that Che´ri had thrown his socks on the mantel the day before, his underwear on the desk, and his necktie on a bust of Le´a. In spite of herself, she smiled at this warm masculine disorder and half closed her big, peaceful, baby-blue eyes that still had all their brown eyelashes.’’28 Or again, one finds a stereotypical association of the adult male with a kind of childishness, as he is accused of not even being able to dress himself.29 The gynocentric model is thus modified from time to time to engage either a more generalized and normative social order or to avoid falling into a simplistic reversal of the ‘‘normal,’’ since such a simplistic reversal would be perceived as revisionist instead of revolutionary. In these depictions, Colette successfully upends or overturns classic bivalent, phallocentric definitions of gender and gender roles. In a reinscription and development of the homosocial element and in preparation for the more fully developed homosocial episode with Desmond after the failure of Che´ri’s marriage, Colette orders Che´ri’s unfettered queer masculinity through a reduction in his eyes of the feminine to the masculine. The first exchange comes at an unexpected moment in which Che´ri’s seeming renunciation of the feminine in favor of the transvestite homosocial or homosexual—for a sexual relation is still implied between Che´ri and Le´a—illuminates a seemingly new aspect of his personality: He cuddled up to Le´a’s shoulder and closed his eyes. No women . . . Great . . . Lea, tell me, are you a brother? Yes? Let’s go then. Women? I’m through with them. I’ve seen them.30

One could argue for a variety of explanations for Che´ri’s turn toward this version of the homosocial. Part of it is simply the supposed comfort of being with Le´a, reinforced by his belief in their equivalence as members of an exchange system; if the pearl necklace, according to Che´ri, looks better on him than on her, that is an accident, in the Aristotelian sense. More important in his eyes is that the two of them occupy similar positions in the exchange system, and this means that his indirect position relative to the gentlemen callers is for him equivalent to her direct position. This would mean, however, that he too is a woman, a possibility that is not excluded by the ontogeny already described. He inverts their positions by turning the comfort zone of two ‘‘women’’ into the confraternity or homosociality of

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two men, as he calls her a brother (fre`re) again31 and allows that he is at ease and comfortable with her, ostensibly in that fraternal role. The second explanation of this figure of inversion is the fundamental narcissism into which Che´ri has been thrown since his birth. And yet, although the figure of ‘‘inversion’’ was certainly still in vogue when Colette wrote Che´ri—a few years later, in Le Troisie`me Sexe, her ex-husband Willy would write of ‘‘the octopus of inversion’’—I hesitate to invoke a scientific, medical, or pathological explanation, when a literary one based on structures of consciousness and means of representation covers much more of the book. Beyond that, should one posit a certain truth to some version of the Oedipal structure in human reality, the kind of structural psychogenesis that is offered here might be more likely, depending on family dynamics, to produce either a more classic homosexual typology or a macho man; Che´ri fits neither category. Thus, rather than serving as a psychological device, the narcissism at the heart of Che´ri’s being is a mechanism that structures the author’s detouring of masculinity into fluid positions. This narcissism goes far in terms of structuring the inversion from the homosocial into the homosexual. Colette is quite explicit here; after Che´ri has turned Le´a into a man, he requests a kiss.32 This is nothing less than a man kissing another man in a queer embrace that leaves no wiggle room for rescuing male heterosexuality from the position of inversion always already determined by the inversion at the origin of the name of the father into the name of the mother. Several pages later, Le´a attempts to rectify the egalitarianism presumed by Che´ri as well as the implicit queering of her position, but it is ultimately in vain. This correction comes at the end of their relationship and just precedes the next set of episodes in the novel which consist of the carnivalesque parody of marriage of Che´ri and Edme´e. So Le´a’s attempt has no consequences. Still, this knowledge is not hers and she tries to refigure the dynamic: —You understand, my dear . . . —Call me ‘‘Madame’’ or Le´a. I am neither your maid nor a pal your own age.33

Yet Le´a cannot perform the normalization or rectification of the positions of the two: her command cannot be followed, and Che´ri’s reconfigured queer dynamics is a perfect prelude to the failure of the marriage as a dyadic, dynamic relationship between a man and a woman. In both cases, there is a failed speech act: internal to their dynamic, Le´a cannot muster the authority to perform that re-equilibration that would turn Che´ri back into a nonqueer

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man. Similarly, even if the marriage is produced by the performative act of authority that marries Che´ri and Edme´e, it will ultimately be one in name only. Marriage between a queered man and an educated, bourgeois woman is doomed to fail in this universe because the pairing is monstrous and because the dynamics of this gynocentric universe depend on the centrality of the bourgeois marriage (for propagation and for inheritance) and on the escape mechanisms that protect the marriage: mistresses, courtesans, prostitution, and all other related activities that allow for a reinforcement of the structure without a perversion of it. None of this will work for the narcissistic, queer Che´ri whose position in marriage is marked by the queerness before and the queerness to come. Unfit for heteronormative, bourgeois society, he can perform only a parody of bourgeois existence doomed to fail. Colette places the marriage episode under the sign of Flaubert and thus under the sign of failure. Viewed by Le´a, the marriage, like Emma Bovary’s view of her ball at the Vaubyessard, is retrospectively counted and enumerated. And it is perhaps only a coincidence that it evokes both Fre´de´ric’s and Deslauriers’s retrospective glance at their moment of relative plenitude at the end of L’E´ducation sentimentale and Flaubert’s own mocking of honeymoons in Italy in his Dictionnaire des ide´es rec¸ues, as she recalls that they’ve been married for a month and that they are probably making love in Italy.34 But even if her position seems to resemble a grumbling one of sour grapes, Le´a knows that the marriage will not work: if she has not ever fully understood Che´ri, she has viscerally understood that he, like many of Colette’s other characters, is not the marrying kind. As a woman of the world, Le´a does understand Che´ri, but she does not have the queer vocabulary necessary to articulate her position relative to his masculinity. Indeed, Colette can only go at matters in an oblique and inferential manner. It will not be until Le Pur et l’impur that she will be able to start to articulate male queerness, whereas she is, from the very first, able to do so with female queerness. Thus here, despite Le´a’s understanding, Colette must say that she does not understand him: ‘‘Le´a had understood . . . nothing of Che´ri.’’35 Le´a’s musings—for hers is the voice of reason in the novel—guarantee that the readers understand the truth about Che´ri in spite of this contradictory position of knowledge and nonknowledge. Madame Peloux could not be the voice of reason, and this ironically, in spite her position as the nom de la me`re. She cannot distinguish; she cannot separate; she cannot castrate (or whatever the equivalent might be in this world): ‘‘Madame Peloux had not moved in twenty-five years and kept all the successive errors of her crazy, rat-pack

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taste in their place.’’36 Again, Colette is underlining the question of vocabulary by using the word ‘‘the´saurisateur’’ to describe Madame Peloux’s hoarding instinct: whereas Le´a does not have the vocabulary needed for the situation, Madame Peloux, it is inferred, makes equivalences and synonyms between words (or things). Yet again, for articulating a queer position, this synonymy is not possible. Rather than rehash a psychological approach to the failure of the marriage, Colette places the marriage under the sign of the aesthetic. In so doing, while continuing to show the incarnations and consequences of Che´ri’s queered narcissism, she adds a specific additional dimension to the portrait of the character and to the failure of the marriage: the marriage also fails because Che´ri cannot escape the aesthetic prison of his own creation and his is a solitary cell, at least insofar as heterosexuality is concerned. There is no place for Edme´e in the luxurious prison he seeks to create for himself and not for them as a couple. The construction of the prison starts from a rather outrageous radiation from Che´ri’s personal and idiosyncratic conception of his own beauty and continues to develop as a reflection of him until a point is reached where Edme´e can no longer take the aestheticization of their marriage in place of conventional bonds of bourgeois society. A seemingly accidental question tells much, as Che´ri asks Edme´e why he has ‘‘beautiful eyes.’’37 While Edme´e gives a more or less conventional answer to the effect that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, i.e., because she loves them, he retorts that her response is ‘‘poe´sie,’’ that is, ‘‘clap-trap’’ or ‘‘hogwash.’’ According to him, his eyes are beautiful because, for him they resemble a sole (the fish). Pisciform eyes are perhaps moon-shaped or slightly elongated, almond-shaped eyes; it little matters, for the point is that Edme´e cannot enter into Che´ri’s idiosyncratic aesthetic of self: she could never have come up with that singular answer. Convinced that he stands alone as a figure of self-reflective masculinity, Che´ri is free to pursue his dream of domesticity, to create a house that is a reflection of him and not of his wife (perhaps the traditional approach, as the woman’s space is the space of domesticity) or of them as a couple (perhaps a more modern approach to the situation, where the two are blended). The new house will be a masturbatory fantasy, a combination of a kind of cult of the male body, a self-reflective narcissism, luxury, and a figure of outlandish taste marked by the black bathroom, little expected in a straight work of the era but certainly an appeal to a kind of decadence worthy of Huysmans’s Jean des Esseintes: ‘‘Bad weather slowed down the completion of a new house, on avenue Henri-Martin, as well as Che´ri’s self-indulgences: he wanted a black

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bathroom, a Chinese living room, and a basement with a swimming pool and a gymnasium.’’38 This is, to be sure, hardly standard straight middleclass taste. Whereas the author does not hesitate to make Che´ri a kind of domestic tyrant, she also ensures that he not really enter into the realm of traditional masculinity, despite the fact that his station and the location of the house in the tony sixteenth arrondissement demand participation in a hierarchy in which the male from the higher class has to be the possessor of the phallus and the occupier of the position of authority. Che´ri begrudgingly participates for a while in this farce, but the aestheticized position based on the development of his masculinity through all the mechanisms already mentioned trumps the Oedipal, hierarchic structure necessitated by this concept of traditional, monied domesticity: ‘‘He consulted his young wife rarely, although he made a display of his authority for her and he took care to hide his uncertainly from time to time with brief orders. She discovered that if he instinctively knew how to play with colors, he disdained beautiful forms and the characteristics of styles.’’39 If in her dutiful devotion to her husband, Edme´e buys into the aesthetization of their marriage, it is undoubtedly in recognition of the price at which it comes: the aesthetic replaces the nuptial; the narcissistic replaces the contractual; the solipsistic replaces the empathic, for there is no room in the marriage for another beyond himself and the reflections of him. Seduced by the aesthetic, Edme´e is also soon at the end of her rope, exasperated by this queered marriage into which she has been thrust: ‘‘She caressed, secretly seduced and revolted, such images that transformed their future abode into a sort of equivocal palace, a temple to Che´ri’s glory.’’40 Again lacking a queer vocabulary yet insisting on his generosity in a way that calls attention to his self-centeredness, Che´ri has to settle for language that relates to scarification and castration; at the same time, Edme´e’s language is transformed as well: —Since you have a diploma, isn’t there some sort of . . . saying that says, don’t touch the knife, the dagger, the thingamabob? —The hatchet, she replied mechanically. —That’s it. Well, my dear, don’t touch the hatchet. That is, hurt a man . . . in the favors he bestows, if I may so speak. You hurt me in the gifts I give you . . . You hurt me in the favors I bestow. —You . . . you are speaking like a kept woman [cocotte], she stammered.41

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Edme´e wishes perhaps to insult him by comparing him to his mother, yet that linguistic transformation is liberating. When Edme´e leaves her comfortable, presentable middle-class vocabulary and enters a discourse belonging to the demimonde from which he and her mother have come, he can recover a safe position in which there is no threat of castration and no possibility of belonging to the comfortable world of hierarchized masculinity and femininity: Che´ri has returned to the world of the feminine. He starts the conversation by articulating the perceived threat to his ordinary masculinity. From her point of view, Edme´e has cheapened him by calling him a cocotte. It remains only for Che´ri to requeer the couple by marking her too as a cheap tart in this new version of his aestheticized position; through namecalling, they become a lesbian couple, at least for a moment: ‘‘Excuse me, excuse me. I’d shock you in affirming, on the contrary, that it is you who is thinking like a street-walker. Don’t underestimate young Mr. Peloux. I know all about ‘kept women,’ as you call them. A ‘kept woman’ is a lady who generally arranges to get more than she gives.’’42 And that effectively ends Che´ri’s vague attempts to be part of the bourgeois world while maintaining a vocabulary, a sense of self, an aesthetics, and a position that belong only in the queer demimonde from which he has come. Edme´e’s final retort, intended to be deprecating and insulting, is nothing more than the palinodic reversal of the failed speech act that was supposed to create the marriage: ‘‘I’ve seen handsomer men that you in Italy. They are everywhere. My nineteen years are as good as those of the neighbor, one handsome guy is as good as another; everything can be arranged . . . Now, a marriage is the measure of nothing.’’43 If we now turn to the beginning of the episode between Che´ri and Desmond, who is described as a ‘‘parasite,’’44 it would seem that the opposition is between conventional marriage and a return to Le´a; egotist that he is, Che´ri wants to have matters both ways: ‘‘But Che´ri, both circumspect and tipsy, didn’t stop speaking of Le´a. He said reasonable things, filled with a good marital sense. He praised marriage, while doing justice to Lea´’s virtues.’’45 But the discourse of raging heteronormativity soon changes or is silenced as Che´ri starts to stay in Desmond’s rooms at the Morris hotel: ‘‘In ten minutes, they were at the Morris. The sky blue and ivory of a bedroom and the fake empire style of a little living room smiled at Che´ri like old friends. He bathed, borrowed a silk nightshirt from Desmond that was too tight, went to bed, and, wedged between two big, soft pillows, fell into a dreamless sleep, a black, thick sleep that protected him all over . . .’’46 Yet if

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Che´ri occupies Desmond’s bed, where does Desmond himself sleep? Does he sleep on a couch or a day bed conveniently not mentioned in the little living room? Does he share his bed with Che´ri? Che´ri has already assumed Desmond’s position by borrowing a nightshirt from him and probably has usurped his place in bed as well. It is tempting to assume that Desmond slips in beside him, further adding to the queered aspect of Che´ri’s existence. Admittedly, the evidence is minimal, but Che´ri will wake his friend in a manner that does not exactly say where they are: ‘‘Up at eight o’clock shaved, shod, feverish, Che´ri shook Desmond, who was sleeping, pallid, awful to see and swollen in his sleep, like a drowned man.’’47 Colette begs the question with the use of the word ‘‘swollen’’ just as she has with the nightshirt that is too tight; the tints are there, but nothing can be said overtly. Immediately thereafter, Desmond is absorbed by Che´ri’s beauty, just as Le´a has been: ‘‘The sleeper sat up and fixed his eyes, the color of muddy water, on his friend. He feigned stupor to prolong an attentive examination of Che´ri, Che´ri dressed in blue, pathetic and superb, pale under the layer of talc knowledgeably wiped off.’’48 As Desmond undresses Che´ri with his eyes, his stare repeats the removal of the powder. Moreover, where Desmond sits and where they are, are details that remain open to speculation. But it is precisely because they remain open to speculation that one can comfortably assume the possibility of a queered model in which two men share a bed in a bachelor’s space, in which the friend, like the women in the novel, is absorbed by Che´ri’s masculine beauty. Most significant here is the structured parallel of reflection in both senses of the word: the reflection rendered by a mirror and the ideated reflected pondering that this physical reflection may produce. Le´a’s space and Desmond’s space are then both the spaces of lubricity and self-absorption for Che´ri: He whistled while framing his reflection in the oblong mirror that came to his waist just like the one in Le´a’s room between the two windows. Later, in the other mirror, a gold frame would set off, against a sunlit pink background, his image, be it naked or draped in loose silk, his sumptuous image of a beloved, happy, pampered young man playing with the necklaces and jewels of his mistress.49

The end of the novel tends more toward closing plot and insisting on a kind of rectifying morality. Having failed at marriage, Che´ri will also fail at a final renewal of his relationship with Le´a, despite all attempts. Colette’s language is telling: it is as if Che´ri has been stabbed,50 or as if, in an impossible situation, he has become the difficult child whose mother she could not

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have been.51 This is an impossible return to the initial couple of Madame Peloux and her beloved, adored son, but with a twist: it is, in fact, on the moral level, an annihilation of Che´ri as an individual, one seconded by the plot itself: ‘‘I see . . . I see that I cannot treat someone as a man who is capable, out of spinelessness, of wreaking havoc in the lives of two women.’’52 The word, ‘‘spineless,’’ which certainly characterizes Che´ri’s rather monstrous behavior toward the three women in his life as well as toward Desmond, comes up a number of times in the novel. How else could we characterize his cavalier attitude toward Edme´e as he parodizes a triumphant return, which Colette ironizes in an imputed racism that makes the woman simply an object to be taken, abandoned, and perhaps retaken again, as if a European sailor abandoned ‘‘a little wild bride,’’ like Pinkerton abandoning Cio-Cio-San?53 Or again, one need think only of the monstrous narcissism that comes with his thoughts of Le´a, who becomes no more or less than a sex object in his mind as he reminisces about her.54 In Che´ri, Colette has created a destabilized masculinity that seems to go both less far and further than do her contemporaries Andre´ Gide and Marcel Proust. Less far because she continues to have an ostensibly straight man as her protagonist, whereas they put on stage visibly and openly gay men. But she goes further than they do at times, for she destabilizes the dynamic of sexual relations, challenges androcentrism, and begins to articulate the first arguments of a queer masculinity, regardless of the gender of the desired object.

Proust and the Ethics of Narration The goal of this part of the chapter is to see the implications for narrative of some aspects of very familiar territory, that is to say, ‘‘Un Amour de Swann.’’ While this will not be an integral reading of that part of the novel, it will rather focus on one particular aspect of the implications of the narrative. For lack of a better word, the goal is to explore the moral rights of the narrator to tell the story. All readers are familiar with narratological concepts of intradiegetic and extradiegetic narrators. Readers never question the author’s moral right to create an extradiegetic narrator, as Balzac did in La Come´die humaine, one who penetrates hearts, minds, and bedrooms, because the narrator is a function or instrument, rather than an intradiegetic figure in the story.55 But in the Recherche, we are looking at a specific situation in which the intradiegetic narrator of ‘‘Combray’’ becomes an extradiegetic narrator for ‘‘Un Amour de Swann.’’ He tells tales as if he were a Balzacian

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narrator and equally importantly, he gives narrative information about people he knows, with whom he has social relations, and people he respects; he is, to say the least, indiscreet.56 What relation is there between ethical positions and social mores and the narrative and how does this nexus relate to the subversion of verisimilitude? By the time readers get to ‘‘Un Amour de Swann,’’ the first-person narrator of ‘‘Combray’’ has already shown us his imperfections, shortcomings, neuroses, obsessions, subjectivity, and limited point of view. He has allowed, for example, that the two ‘‘ways’’—Swann’s and that of the Guermantes— are not compossible.57 And it will not be for several thousands of pages that he figures out what any child of ten would have known about a small country town; these paths join and are totally possible in the same space. In ‘‘Combray’’ he has talked about his longings and about strange connections, whether it is the ‘‘lady in pink’’ (la dame en rose) or the mistaken notion that Odette is having an affair with Charlus. Given that we know the character so intimately already, the question about narrative ethics immediately becomes a double one. First, there is the standard narrative problem that relates to the sheer possibility of taking a position that amounts to one not distant from that of the omniscient Balzacian narrator when one has already announced a limited subjectivity. Yet this same subjective narrator announces that he is going to tell a story about two characters we have already met and that this story takes place before he was born: ‘‘I had learned about a love that Swann had had before my birth, with that precision of details that is sometimes easier to obtain for the lives of people who have been dead for centuries than it is for our best friends.’’58 It seems to be irrelevant that Swann has not been dead for centuries or that Odette is still alive; it seems as well that both Swann and Odette, who is not just ‘‘a love,’’ but Swann’s wife and Gilberte’s mother, are among Marcel’s (or his family’s) best friends. All that aside, for we are perhaps inured to tales told out of school, it is simply a logical contradiction to think that such a limited, subjective, firstperson narrator who is incarnate as such and not the disembodied figure of La Come´die humaine could get details such as those relative to Swann’s first ‘‘possession’’ of Odette after the scene with the catelya orchids when no one else was present in the vehicle.59 Swann is long dead and one does not suppose that Odette, now matronly, goes around telling the intimate details of the story.60 If the ‘‘national anthem of our love,’’ the theme from the Vinteuil sonata, could have been observed (though again, it is highly unlikely that the rather limited Madame Verdurin, now Princesse de Guermantes, would have had the necessary insight or memory to do so), the

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love-making scene is a logical impossibility in terms of Marcel’s ability, as the narrator, to know the details. The second part of the dilemma is more moral than instrumental. How does this character, having assumed the role of extradiegetic narrator in ‘‘Un amour de Swann,’’ have any right to tell this story and, in a way, betray multiple relations and friendships, given that he is only temporarily an extradiegetic figure? It is one thing for the omniscient, invisible, anonymous figure of the Balzacian narrator to tell sordid tales of Rastignac’s social climb, Rubempre´’s failed loves, or scabrous tales of adultery or marginal sexualities. No one thinks for a moment that this is anything but an instrument that allows the tales to be told. Certainly Balzac’s narrator, even in his omniscience, has particular limitations and values; yet readers do not think that he is necessarily imposing them, and he himself often undercuts them through irony. At the same time readers do not think that he is telling tales out of school or washing family linen in public, but even a moralizing reader who found the stories ‘‘dirty,’’ like the singer of the refrain ‘‘Chaucer, Rabelais, Bal-zac’’ in The Music Man, would not blame the narrator but the author, his times, or French immorality. Yet Marcel knows these people, and it little matters that he is telling a tale that happened before he was born. While for purposes of literary analysis, we conveniently separate the two functions of Marcel as protagonist— though he is never named directly as such—and Marcel as the narrator, whom we call the narrator, we also know that they are one and the same figure. He is friends with Gilberte and with Charlus after a fashion and he sees Odette socially; and yet he allows himself to tell these stories about people to whom he is close. It is not as if the portrait of Odette in particular is an especially flattering one nor will the picture he paints of Charlus and Jupien or Charlus at the brothel be particularly laudatory. But in the last two situations, he is at least telling the stories through his own experiences as a character. But with ‘‘Un Amour de Swann,’’ this is and is not the case, and, in that limbo, it is a strange betrayal of friendship, and the indices should— but do not—make us wonder about what follows. Strangely then, this part of the novel is asking readers to think about the ethics of narration: on the one hand, the narrative purports to be a first-person narrative even though it provides unlimited, objective insights, and, on the other hand, it aims to be a verisimilar novel with psychological reality. Third-person omniscient narrative works precisely because we do not ascribe a singular particular psychology to the narrative function, but accept it as an instrument by which to communicate something that no individual could possibly know. Here,

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however, we know Marcel, know his psychology, yet suspend our disbelief—or do we?—as he tells the tale of ‘‘Un Amour de Swann.’’ This impossible narrative position and ethical aporia correspond to one of the main epistemological dilemmas of the first two thousand or so pages. As will be seen below, the narrator truly becomes the narrator, fully and freely, only after the Venetian episode; here he is poised on a threshold that retrospectively looks toward an unknowable past. And it is precisely with ‘‘Un Amour de Swann’’ that Marcel starts the process of becoming a scopophilic narrator whose need to know outstrips any narrative function. Whereas it could be argued that the post-madeleine part of ‘‘Combray’’ is an ordering of the memories of the past, some of which were already given in the kaleidoscope of the first pages, ‘‘Combray’’ remains, for all that, the inscription of a proscribed and prescribed identity for Marcel. This is the first questioning about alterity and difference that begins to replace the reinscription of the self. Certainly he has drama, and his inscription, albeit a belated one, of Freud’s fort-da in the famous ‘‘drame du coucher’’ is well-known, as is the substitution in the fort-da drama, which itself can be also read as a belated Oedipal crisis, of literature for the body of the parent. Literature becomes the substitute, the palliative, and the symbolic investment that are an answer to the first writing fragment, a secondary answer to the first that ‘‘there is no answer.’’61 But Combray remains a rediscovery and reinscription of the familiar and the familial, whether it is the tried and true habits of the family, its rituals, or its walks, or wondering who is at the garden gate when everyone knows that it can only be Swann. And even Swann, who is the one outsider of sorts playing a major role, is a tame version of himself; his exploits are dedramatized and normalized for provincial life; even his ‘‘naughty wife’’ (coquine de femme) is trivialized in a false act of adultery with Charlus.62 Yet after 180 pages or so, there is a blank or a gap conveniently placed, an empty moment after ecstasy: ‘‘It is by Me´se´glise that I have to stay alone, breathing in ecstasy.’’63 This is a masturbatory fantasy, to be sure, dreamt of in bed, but arguably one that pushes him out, over, and into a liminal stage that is the setting for difference. Ecstasy is standing apart from one’s normally occupied position; Marcel is standing outside himself, and that act or action, with the accompanying breath or pneuma, infuses new possibilities into the narration. Combray’s presence melts in favor of the inscription of absence: dead people, telephonic communication, the past, and ‘‘all Combray and its surroundings’’ give way to mosaics, to difference, and to fault lines: ‘‘if not

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fissures, real fault-lines, at least those veins, those color variations that, in some rocks and marbles, reveal difference of origin, age, and ‘formation.’ ’’64 This space of difference, which is also the space of diffe´rance, is the locus that is the home, the unheimlich home for talking about and being that other, as well as for becoming that impossible narrative position. And when the sun famously rises, as it does in the last paragraph of ‘‘Combray,’’ it will be on a world in which difference has installed itself, where the illusion of plenitude can no longer be, and where complete alienation from self and sameness is the only possibility. If ‘‘Combray’’ was about the same, and the reinscription of the familial, ‘‘Un Amour de Swann,’’ in contrast, will be about the question and possibility of belonging, elective or otherwise, and the morals, ethics, and mores that are the price of that belonging. The very beginning of the section is telltale, with its insistence on scientific logic: ‘‘To be part of the ‘little nucleus,’ the ‘little group,’ the ‘little clan’ of the Verdurins, one condition was sufficient but necessary: one had to adhere to a Credo.’’65 A little further on we learn that ‘‘Any ‘new recruit’ whom the Verdurins could not persuade [of the fact] that evenings filled with people who didn’t come to the Verdurins’ place were as dry as dust was immediately excluded.’’66 Now one can imagine that the rules of the game here, such as preferring the young pianist to Plante´ or Rubinstein, are themselves fairly inconsequential, but a credo is something to be taken seriously, and the Nicene Creed, the credo of all credos, is a document to be reckoned with. This point is underlined toward the end of the first paragraph where the narrator mentions ‘‘the orthodxy of the little church.’’67 Thus, belonging and believing are essential, and without belief, there is exclusion. Since there is nothing, from the point of view of the Verdurins, outside of their realm, since it is a vast wasteland out there, someone who is excluded is condemned to be outside of paradise. Belief and belonging wind up being positions necessary to participation in a world. But that is precisely the point: the narrator’s liminality retrospectively is not itself engaged except by his feigned position of omniscient narrator. He cannot belong, he cannot be a Wagnerian during the height of Wagnerism, and he cannot seduce Odette instead of Swann; what he can do is control the world by defining it and redefining it according to his Balzacian eye. In addition to providing the background that will be necessary for Marcel eventually to copy Swann’s actions and attitudes, ‘‘Un Amour de Swann’’ will also be both a morality play about how to develop a social position not determined by family values and a narrative position that goes beyond the self. Thus, ‘‘Un Amour de Swann’’ stands in contrast to ‘‘Combray,’’ which

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is a constant reiteration of the same. This is seen not only in the dramas of going to bed and the walks en famille but also in the iterative discourses of the grandmother’s sisters who are the incarnation of endogamy, which is thereby set up, in ‘‘Combray,’’ as the metonym of moral discourse. Their ritualized comments, along with the grandmother’s refusal to maintain social contact with Madame de Villeparisis, are the exemplification of this endogamous morality. Stick to who you are, be identical to who you are, the discourse says, and you will maintain the moral values of your person, station, and class. And it little matters that there are, here and there, hints of difference, be they metaphoric such as the interplay between the church and the hawthorns, transformative, such as the interplay between the Duchesse de Guermantes and the stained glass window, or downright allocentric, such as the suggestion that Marcel talk to the doctor about the Duchesse de Guermantes. All of these hints will be played out in the rest of the novel, but in ‘‘Combray,’’ they are nothing more than isolated, scattered remarks that show that something may be awry, but that ‘‘something’’ cannot be parsed, for there is no language to do so. When something allocentric occurs that might be a threat, the moral forces of endogamy squelch it in no uncertain terms. The mise-en-sce`ne of ‘‘Un Amour de Swann’’ immediately sets exogamy and allocentrism into place. While ‘‘exogamy’’ is not yet the right word here, even though it will ultimately be a question of a marriage between Swann and Odette, a mismatched pair if ever there were one, it is more a question of ‘‘exophilia,’’ of friendships going beyond a group. From the beginning, there is a startling contrast with the seeming endophilia of the Verdurin clan, in its need for a secular Nicene Creed and the thinly veiled reality of allocentric morality and mores: ‘‘Certainly the ‘little nucleus’ had no relation to the society that Swann frequented.’’68 So whereas in Combray there is no possibility other than the morality of the system of family values, at every point in ‘‘Un Amour de Swann,’’ another possibility is given. The character has a choice; he or she can be a part of a group, like the Verdurin circle, or part of several groups with differing moral values, codes, credos, and beliefs. Proust is showing his readers, for the express benefits of his protagonist/narrator, the social constructivism not of gender but rather of the social itself. Readers are therefore in a strange narrative situation at this early point in the novel. On the one hand, the first-person narrator has been replaced by an impossible, omniscient third-person narrator who is extradiegetic and therefore anonymous, even though we know who he is. On the other hand,

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this extradiegetic omniscience is that in name only: the author of the novel is teaching his narrator to learn, to observe, to narrate, and to know. In the oddest fashion, the seemingly omniscient narrator is also the silent hero of a Bildungsroman in which it is not the protagonist who learns, but rather the narrator, who will return to being the protagonist once this seeming Balzacian novel within a novel has reached its conclusion. It will be then and only then that the first-person narrator shows evidence of being yet another contradiction, the omniscient first-person narrator of the Recherche. If he does not become the writer of the novel until much later, it is at the end of ‘‘Un Amour de Swann’’ that he occupies the singular position of a reliable first-person narrator, far more expansive than the self-reflective narrator of ‘‘Combray’’ who could talk only about himself and his family. Thus does Proust have the narrator insist on Swann’s difference, not only from the Verdurin clan, which is something that readers already know, or from Marcel’s family, noticeably absent from this part of the book. Swann is from a different world: [Swann] was not like some many people who, out of laziness or the resigned feeling, created by social achievement, of obligation to remain attached to a certain shore, refrain from the pleasures that reality presents them outside of the worldly position in which they remain confined until their death, and content themselves with winding up calling pleasures, for lack of a better word, once they have gotten used to things, the mediocre diversions or bearable annoyances that such a position holds for them.69

On the surface, Proust means that people settle for the easy way out and for the comfortable instead of seeking out true pleasure. And they settle in part because of habit and in part because of what might be called the BrillatSavarin philosophy of ‘‘you are what you eat,’’ described in La Physiologie du gouˆt. Long before Pierre Bourdieu’s La Distinction, Brillat-Savarin says that you can tell everything, by which he means social status and the like, about a person by what he or she eats. Thus, as I suggested in Chapter 2, someone who casually eats brioche would be coded semiotically as coming from a higher class background than someone who eats a bowlful of ratatouille or vermicelli in Germinal. Proust is also suggesting not only that one might find true pleasure in something outside one’s habitus or habitual class. In addition, he suggests that this crossing of class lines out of hedonistic interest can go toward the high end, for instance, toward appreciating Vermeer, or that it can be rather heterodox and iconoclastic: Charlus being whipped when he is in the brothel.

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Proust is also suggesting that these comfortable pleasures are palliatives or opiates as well as avoidance measures, avoidance of the new, the different, and the unknown. They interfere with a real jouissance, as they are determined by the good behavior modeled for each individual by the families and classes he or she comes from. By definition then, since individuals are modeled to be subjected to some version of the Oedipus complex for a middle-class boy or to behave like a ‘‘jeune fille bien range´e,’’ to use Simone de Beauvoir’s expression for a middle-class girl, and to behave in various other proscribed ways for different classes, times, societies, and structures, they are always programmed to behave and not to cut loose. So individuals, be they characters or the narrator, are enjoined from real pleasure—from jouissance—by the very structures that determine subjectivity. Proust is thus suggesting—albeit ironically, since his own escapes from the middle classes were few and far between and rather predictable fugues, thus perhaps themselves determined by middle-class morality—that his protagonist must somehow escape his own subjectivity, something seemingly impossible, in order to become the narrator. It is for that reason that the leap is made in terms of mores but also in terms of diegesis. Here then, Proust’s use of the word ‘‘reality’’ is strangely prescient of the Lacanian real, that locus in which language does not and cannot go, that locus that is neither constructed as reflection, like the Lacanian imaginary, nor mediated by language, like the symbolic order. For Proust, jouissance can happen only in that order of the real. And yet the novelistic irony is that there is no spot for the real, no spot where language cannot go. So the solution is that the jouissance does not happen in some real beyond language but rather that the real exists in the gaps in language, in the slippages in language, in the diffe´rance that underlies and deconstructs language. While there is no jouissance in the order of the real in ‘‘Un Amour de Swann,’’ the concept of jouissance helps explain Proust’s extensive use of analepsis and prolepsis in the novel, as Ge´rard Genette has so famously discussed.70 Proust’s stylistic turn with analepsis and prolepsis refers to an event in the re´cit but also usually implies something at the narrative or metanarrative level. One of the raisons d’eˆtre for the use of this technique—yet another subversion of the usual practices of verisimilitude—is that the repetition of events in slightly different ways opens them up and lets the real have wider berth, despite the fact that the later explanations usually explain ‘‘more’’ than earlier ones, as the narrator has become more comfortable or as Marcel is more knowledgeable. Similarly a motif like ‘‘doing the orchids’’

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or ‘‘the national anthem of our love’’71 can be explained not only as metaphors for a rather ordinary love affair, banal but for the language used by Proust to create them, but also as the metaphorical space in which jouissance can happen. The narrator knows this: he creates this space precisely for that reason, the possibility of jouissance through the creation of an impossible narrative position. The narrative and its attendant morality become the spaces not of Balzacian omniscience, despite the impossible position that the narrator has chosen, but of uncertainty, in which ‘‘Un Amour de Swann,’’ a misnomer if ever there were one, is constructed. So when, for example Swann and Odette meet, it happens in this realm of the real that is always already marked as being different from the typical Swannian spaces of pleasure that have formed and informed his sex life theretofore. The narrator reminds us that each of Swann’s affairs occurred because the face or the body of the woman looked like a well-known piece of art. To say that he was not in love with any of these women is an understatement; to accuse him of immorality is probably an exaggeration. In a very long, classical Proustian sentence, the narrator informs us that unlike these other women, Swann was indifferent to, not to say repulsed by Odette’s looks, for she is ‘‘that sort of woman whom everyone knows, different for each of us, and who are the opposite of the type our senses demand.’’72 This phrase is consonant with the introduction of the real and the possibility for jouissance in this part of the novel in particular, but this detour will also be one of the general rules of desire for the remainder of the novel. And in the short run, this means that Swann takes to Odette precisely because she is not his type, and because it is only with someone who is not his type, a common-looking woman who does not resemble any famous work of art, that there can be ‘‘un amour de Swann.’’ It is only later that he will find the resemblance to Jethro’s daughter Zipporah.73 Swann’s subsequent identification of Odette with Zipporah will seal their fate by moving it out of the real and back into the symbolic order of everyday pleasures. In the longer run, this vacillation will provide the model, not only for Marcel’s jealously, mimetically modeled on Swann’s, but also for his model of making the wrong object choice, and only in part because of a kind of Girardian mimetism. For it is also the case that if Odette is identified with Zipporah, then Swann must necessarily be identified with her husband, who is none other than Moses. So Marcel has no choice: if the Verdurin clan follows a credo, Marcel must follow Mosaic law. In any case, it is as if the narrator retrospectively tells his earlier self how inappropriately

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to fall in love. The narrative turn creates the possibilities of a heterodoxy that will be confirmed in episode after episode in the remainder of the work. There is one further ambiguity in the sentence in which the introduction and meeting occur: ‘‘il fut pre´sente´ a` Odette de Cre´cy par un de ses amis d’autrefois.’’74 Logic and form as well as the mores of the time seem to indicate that the translation should be: ‘‘he was presented to Odette de Cre´cy by one of his former friends.’’ But grammar dictates otherwise: the grammatical antecedent for ‘‘ses’’ is ‘‘Odette de Cre´cy,’’ which means that ‘‘he was presented to Odette de Cre´cy by one of her former friends,’’ a sentence that does not make sense socially or even verisimilarly. The error, while undoubtedly accidental, is nonetheless telling: the only way for the real to occur, the only way that mores and morality can truly be violated is by that gap in language. While maintaining a total facade of civility for his characters in ‘‘Un Amour de Swann,’’ Proust manages, despite all constraints, to get in a few perverse figures even in the most civil act of introduction, just as he did in the notion of belonging. Proust takes great pains to point out this relationship’s difference from both those that Swann has previously had and from those that he might be expected to have, given the social culture and circles of which he is a part. Given Swann’s social status, offered in bits and pieces as we learn who his friends are, among them, the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VII) and the Duchesse de Guermantes, it is totally fitting and appropriate that he have a mistress, in the most classical sense of the word, and that he visit her regularly. Within the context of French social mores of the time, there is nothing unseemly or immoral in such a hypothetical situation, and given Odette’s clear status as a demimondaine, one could easily argue that for him not to visit her is inappropriate—not immoral, but certainly against the grain of society’s dictates: ‘‘But he never went to her place. Only twice in the afternoon did he participate in that operation so important to her: ‘having tea.’ ’’75 The moral order is upset by this singularity and thus the received semiotic order is upset as well, which is central to the apprenticeship in writing that is occurring here. The narrative singularly repeats the impropriety of the situation at a key moment: ‘‘A second visit he made had perhaps more importance.’’76 The ‘‘perhaps’’ is telling: as much as the narrator assures us that he has these powers of penetration, he does not know or he does not yet know the extent of the importance of what he is writing; he may have all the facts, but he does not have the interpretative powers. It is ironic that he has all the facts when he is a third-person narrator but not the insight,

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yet he has the insights as the first-person narrator he cannot be in this situation. This is all the more striking, since this very paragraph is one in which Odette goes through a Swannian metamorphosis and turns from being one of those women whom Swann would consider ugly to resembling Zipporah, a figure in a Botticelli painting in the Sistine Chapel. If the narrator goes on to explain that this is one of Swann’s manias, we already know this as early as the scene at Combray in which the unwed and pregnant kitchenmaid is said to resemble Giotto’s Charity. So the news that Swann loves or is bound to make these connections is no news at all. What is news is that the narrator cannot find an adequate explanation for Swann’s predilection and that, in a startling stylistic turn, the narrator anaphorically repeats the ‘‘perhaps’’ with which the paragraph started,77 as he looks for explanations, none of which are satisfactory. Both strange and expected—unheimlich—is the necessary hole in the narrative, the gap that is necessary for the affair to continue: Swann reproached himself for having miscalculated the value of someone who would have appeared adorable to the great Sandro and congratulated himself that the pleasure he had seeing Odette found a justification in his own aesthetic culture. He told himself that in associating the thought of Odette with his dreams of happiness he had not resigned himself to a makeshift solution as imperfect as he had thought theretofore, for she fulfilled in his most refined tastes in art. He forgot that Odette was still not a woman according to his desire, since his desire had always been oriented in an opposite direction from that of his aesthetic tastes.78

The grammatical and syntactic ambiguities have returned: the pleasure he had in seeing Odette found justification logically in his culture but grammatically, it was in her culture. And the narrator knows the unknowable in telling the reader what Swann told himself and arguably no one else. But the most telling gap is Swann’s forgetting what the narrator remembers for him, that his desires and his aesthetics were always on opposite paths. Thus the narrator can shift Odette retrospectively into Swann’s aesthetics in that gap of forgetfulness and he, the narrator, can align the narration with the need to realign mores in a model in which simple oppositions no longer work and in which simple definitions of self and other are no longer valid. The narrator enters Swann’s mind in an impossible way, but it serves the narrative as well as furthers the plot of the novel at an important point at which the insertion of the aesthetic displaces any real desire.

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At the level of the retrospective story, this occurs with a triple displacement all contained in one short, very non-Proustian sentence: ‘‘On his worktable, he put a reproduction of Jethro’s daughter, as if it were a photograph of Odette.’’79 The obvious displacement is that he does not put a photograph of Odette on the table, as one might normally expect, but rather a copy of the Botticelli. But it is also important that the narrator does not call the figure by her own name but by her relation to her father (and as opposed to her husband), when it is already known from the questions that come from a retrospective rethinking of ‘‘Combray’’ and a comparative reading of family values in these first two sections, that one of the points ‘‘Un Amour de Swann’’ makes is the questioning of family relations. Thus calling her ‘‘Jethro’s daughter’’ lessens the aesthetic position or the position of desire and calling her Moses’ wife would only have underlined the fact that Marcel will have to follow Swann’s pattern. Finally, there is the choice of the word ‘‘reproduction,’’ when Proust clearly could have said ‘‘Botticelli’s picture of Zipporah,’’ as it is shared knowledge that Swann would not have the original. The word ‘‘reproduction,’’ however, is a touch of genius that not only implies normative, familial propagation, but that also implies ‘‘copy,’’ ‘‘representation,’’ and the like. The narrator enters Swann’s mind in a strange way. It is an act of penetration, the impossible reproduction, homosexual in nature, that he needs to have in order to know what Swann knows, thinks, has forgotten, and feels. This outrageous position queers the narrative, and the shift of positions at the threshold between the parts is an impossible one; this homosexual solution is in itself an explanation for what the novel cannot say. The signs are there in ‘‘Combray’’ for Marcel possibly to grow up gay, signs that are in the unconscious of the text and in the gaps in the family discourse. Here, the narrator performs an act of penetration that is the affective and narrative part of the disallowed position, a way truly of exploring otherness by rejecting the familial by turning it on its head, and rejecting the values of sameness and reproduction. Already in the novel, there has been one lesbian scene, the espied scene at Montjouvain between Mademoiselle Vinteuil and her anonymous friend. All but the most naive readers know that the comments made by family members about Odette having a fling with Charlus are patently erroneous. And the received history of the text tells any reader that homosexuality will be an important part of the book. Yet the general sense of Proustian criticism is that, while there are episodic events early on, the semiotics of homosexuality do not really enter until the encounter at Balbec between Marcel

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and Charlus, in which the former, incapable of articulating the words necessary to Charlus’s ogling of him and unable to admit that he might be the object of homosexual gaze or desire, takes the latter for a spy or a madman. Thus, as early as ‘‘Un Amour de Swann,’’ this most heterosexual of texts, Proust is uncoupling language in a way that will permit a space for homosexuality, for the subjectivity of homosexuals, for a language, coded or not, that can be associated with a gay subjectivity. It would be relatively easy to create a space in which an act of same-sex sex occurs. It is far more difficult, at this point in time, to create a space in which a gay character or gay characters can have narrative and psychological believability and credibility. This moment is not the only one of its kind; all of the moments that have been mentioned are instances of uncouplings. Homosexuality will not be the only consequence of this uncoupling and strange recoupling, but it will be one of the possibilities enabled by the ways in which Proust is constructing the strangenesses of ‘‘Un Amour de Swann.’’ Arguably, many of the famous scenes in ‘‘Un Amour de Swann’’ relate to these breaches. Each of these thematic motifs fits into the openings of language in the text: there is, for example, the oddness of the family relation between Saniette and Forcheville, which will eventually relate Madame de Verdurin, become the Princesse de Guermantes, to Odette. Brichot’s entrance brings a new set of discourses, the official discourses of the university, that fit neither with the family discourses of Combray nor with the falsely worldly discourses of the Verdurin circle. And even the short staccato phrases of the famous scene of Swann at Odette’s window, while matching his action, also indicate a va-et-vient, a movement between lies and the truth, an ‘‘intermittence of the heart’’ that will be repeated and fulfilled in later volumes. Linguistic queerness plays out in various ways, but most importantly, it is a tool for driving the breaches in the verisimilar project. Two brief episodes will illustrate the impact. First is the famous witty repartee between the Princesse des Laumes, future Duchesse de Guermantes, and Swann: ‘‘Those Cambremers have rather an astonishing name. It ends in the nick of time, but ends badly,’’ she said, laughing. ‘‘It doesn’t start any better,’’ Swann replied. ‘‘Indeed it is a double abbreviation!’’80

In suggesting that the name ends badly, the Princesse des Laumes is suggesting that had the name continued it would have turned into the famous French expletive ‘‘merde.’’ In suggesting that the name starts badly, Swann is

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suggesting the same thing. Had the first part of the name continued it might have been ‘‘Cambronne,’’ the name of a famous Napoleonic military man, who, when asked to surrender, said, according to recorded history, ‘‘La Garde meurt mais ne se rend pas.’’ Apocryphally, however, he said ‘‘merde,’’ so the expression ‘‘le mot de Cambronne’’ is a euphemism for that word. The little exchange between the two could be taken as nothing more than witty repartee. At the same time, it marks language, humorously this time, as a fragmentary, tessellated set of possibilities, partially joined, partially separated, marked by spaces and gaps. Social structure interweaves with that language, with feedback and feed-forward, so that they mutually construct one another. That the two can spontaneously agree here is a sign that their occupation of social, linguistic, and even moral space is shared, though readers of the whole book will know that the famous ‘‘Guermantes wit’’ is by and large limited to that social glitter, and when it comes to this character, now the Duchesse de Guermantes, actually understanding something in depth, in particular, Swann’s announcement of his impending death, she cannot follow him. Here, however, the witty repartee is referred to as a combination of stasis and metamorphosis that is seldom remarked: ‘‘But Swann and the Princess had the same way of judging little things that had, as an effect—unless it was the cause—a great analogy in the way they expressed themselves, even down to their pronunciation. This resemblance didn’t strike people because nothing was more different than their voices.’’81 After talking about the physical difference of Swann—that he had a mustache and, ostensibly, that the princess did not—the narrator states that the two of them used the ‘‘same sentences, the same inflections, the turns of phrase of the Guermantes clan.’’82 It is noteworthy that the decision, the order, the logic are impossible to decide, for it is unclear whether things are causes or effects. The impossibility of decision thus also clouds whether things are the same or different. There is no arguable reason that Swann and the princess should speak the same way, except for the fact that Proust needs to establish a framework for the fragmentary approach to both language and social structure. A final example would be the anonymous letter that Swann receives one day indicating that Odette had been the mistress of many men and women.83 While no reader would be particularly astonished that Odette had a ‘‘past’’ (or even a present), and while the accusation of lesbian affairs seems to come out of nowhere—though it is a seed to be planted for the eventual relations between Marcel and Albertine—what is astonishing is Swann’s reaction. He is far more concerned about having a friend who would stoop to

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writing such a letter and then about which of his friends might have written the letter.84 It is not any content that is important but the linguistic and social space in which the letter would make sense at the intersection of the linguistic, the social, and the psychological. Even if Monsieur de Charlus’s nature is a bit ‘‘off ’’ (de´traque´),85 that is not reason enough, and the narrator excludes the other two friends through similar reasoning. This is not a space for building the argument about and discourses of homosexuality, but once again, it is an occasion to start to create the space. And in the long passage that follows—again an impossible one in which the narrator reads the mind of Swann long before the former was born—Proust fragments the social and linguistic in order to create new possibilities for his characters. Proust uses various techniques relating to discourses and discursive positions in order to put into question the ‘‘givens’’ of discourse, questions of ipseity and otherness, matters relating to received knowledge. One thought that occurs to me is that a rereading of ‘‘Un Amour de Swann’’ is a useful tool for understanding the problematic positions in the remainder of the novel, at least that part until the return from Venice, when the position of narration is finally solidified, to which I now turn.

Proustian Astonishment Proust’s Recherche remains one of the few twentieth-century romans d’apprentissage that is a fundamental part of the canon of literary modernism, even if it is more talked about than read in its entirety. The novels form a small set, including James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse and perhaps The Waves (though not traditional Bildungsromanen), and Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks and Die Zauberberg. While the Woolf texts are sui generis and fray a singular path toward knowledge and illumination, Portrait of the Artist and Die Zauberberg are more intimate portrayals of an individual in specific situations in which the active role of the family in the formation of the individual is mediated through other institutions and distanced by specific circumstances, art and school for Joyce, Hans Castorp’s relative isolation in a sanatorium for Mann. Buddenbrooks and the Recherche share a double scenario: the individual learning and growing with and against society, discovering himself in these two cases and his particular Familienroman by means of ‘‘family values,’’ and, ultimately, an assessment of the social constructions performed on an individual by the family or its surrogates.86

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Proust’s novel is a roman d’apprentissage, and specifically a Balzacian progress narrative; Vincent Descombes, for example, sees it as an e´tude philosophique: retrospectively examining Proust’s past and that of those near him, given, as I have said, that ‘‘Un Amour de Swann’’ occurs chronologically before Marcel is born.87 The narrator-turned-writer assembles the ‘‘lost time’’ of his life in order to reconstruct it and construct the novel in the process. Going over the raw events of his life as well as studying the collective lesson of the lives of others around him, Marcel, as a character, learns, grows, loves, loses, and writes, as all events become significant and meaningful in the creation of the authorial life that is also the written text. Of course, numerous critics have commented on various aspects of this apprenticeship as the fundamental structuring figure of the literarity of the novel: what makes this work novelistic is precisely the attachment of that fictional life to the project of becoming a writer. This project is realized here and there throughout the novel with the letter-writing scene in Combray, the episode of the ‘‘clochers de Martinville,’’ the article published in Le Figaro, to give just a few of the best-known examples. The project is realized at a mediated meta-level in the creation of figures like Vinteuil, Elstir, and Bergotte, all of whom incarnate the artist producing aesthetic poesis. And it is actualized in the meditations of the final volume that, while still speculative, hypothesize about the possibility of writing a novel. Readers should not confuse the author and his work: Proust is writing a novel, and the narrator, having written a novel that is the story of his life, says that he may write a novel. And yet, for that most self-conscious of narrators—even more than those of Henry James who are not allowed certain kinds of introspection or permitted certain behaviours—one enormous stumbling block is there: what does he make of what he has written? How would he characterize the three thousand pages of which he is so painfully and acutely conscious other than calling them the novel that they form? Equally clear from the novel is that family expectation and the force of the Familienroman, as Marthe Robert has so clearly pointed out, is, for the individual, subject to the laws of the family, which could briefly be summarized as the structures of the Oedipus complex or the Lacanian nom/non du pe`re, to reproduce the family and its values: heterosexuality, productivity and production, ethos, mores, and national, personal, familial, political, and religious identities. The roman d’apprentissage is not exactly the same: sometimes a protagonist will learn to be a member of his or her family; it is more likely that a roman d’apprentissage will be a ‘‘sentimental education’’ through which the character will learn against his or her family: he or she will make object

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choices that are not in his or her family’s interest and, typically, those choices will relate to career or love interests, and less often to political or religious decisions. The self-discovery that is the telos and the method is necessarily a revolutionary act. Beyond the interplay of these two somewhat opposed generic constraints and beyond the definition of what the novel is for the narrator if it is not the novel that he is going to write (but that, in fact, he has already written), there is a turning point at which the reader can say that the novel has converted, that the narrator has become the narrator, and that Marcel has finally caught up to the narrator in terms of knowledge. Even if in the last volume, there are still some reversals to be made as well as some final discoveries. The conversion itself has partially occurred throughout; every experience is a learning experience in which Marcel or the narrator realizes something about himself or about the world and in which the reader, through the repeated use of proleptic and analeptic remarks, will also discover meaning. Occurring in Albertine disparue, the conversion happens through a conscious and unconscious deconstruction of repetition, familiarity, family, and identity; unlike real life, it is not triggered by the death of the mother which would be the ironization of the Oedipal solution, but by the death of Albertine and all that her death and that absence imply. A seemingly insignificant comment made by the narrator shortly after Marcel has learned of Albertine’s death is the point of departure for the coming change. What has been so familiar because it is the inhabited space, that of self-imposed imprisonment as well as that formerly imposed on Albertine, has suddenly been defamiliarized: ‘‘It was finally dark in the apartment; I kept bumping into the furniture in the hallway.’’88 This defamiliarization contrasts markedly with a comment made a few pages earlier after Albertine’s departure, but before her death is announced: I stood up again; I moved into the room only with infinite patience; I oriented myself so as not to see Albertine’s chair, the player piano on whose pedals she placed her gilt slippers, one of the only objects she had worn out, and all of which, in the particular language my memories had taught them, seemed to want to give me a translation, a different version, and announce the news of her departure a second time to me. But without looking at them, I could see them.89

So Marcel knows where things are and can see them in his mind’s eye without any need to see them; he can ideate that familiar space that will become

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defamiliarized only through the death of Albertine.90 This is natural precisely because the space is not only familiar, but also familial: it is the family apartment, the one in which he has lived for quite a long while, and every nook and cranny of the space is known to him. It is therefore the projection of the family onto a space, the metonym of the family and its laws, specifically, the laws relating to furthering the codes of the family, laws of marriage and inheritance. During the entirety of La Prisonnie`re, Marcel’s mother is notably absent, having gone to Combray; she writes Marcel letters in which oblique and not so oblique references are made to the inappropriateness of forming a legal bond with Albertine, as far as the mother’s mores and views of class are concerned. Present in that family space, again as a representative of the hierarchy of the family, is Franc¸oise, who also disapproves of Albertine.91 Albertine’s departure should return things in the family space to the order of ipseity that is that sacrosanct locus of the family and its determination of what is proper, right, and allowable. Yet this is not the case, for she has permanently changed the family space. Present, she graces the space, keeps it alive, and even opens it up as her presence opens Marcel up to new thoughts, ideas, and feelings. These are all produced not simply by her intermittent presence and absence: her departure for a walk renews his enjoyment of solitude. But it is a solitude he will momentarily fill with thoughts about what she may be doing and how she may lie about her activities upon her return. Until that doubt sets in, there is joy in the rediscovery of his presence to himself: ‘‘But it was especially inside of me that I heard with drunkenness a new sound offered up by the internal violin.’’92 A few lines later, however, we find the following in the same paragraph marked by the important word ‘‘longtemps’’: ‘‘Communicating doorways that had been closed for a long time opened anew in my brain.’’93 So if the presence of Albertine, even in a vitiated state that produces jealousy in Marcel, remarks the permanence of the family unit and even if Marcel is being disagreeable vis-a-vis his mother’s wishes, he is acting to continue the family line (even as he imitates Swann here); significantly, Madame de Guermantes has become his landlord as he acts for himself literally and figuratively in loco parentis.94 Albertine has joined the familiar. Thus it is not Albertine’s presence or absence as such that changes matters permanently but rather the knowledge and the inscription of her death in writing. Her death rewrites space in a different way, not as a translation or a different version in a known language, but in a language that is as yet unknown. The letter announcing her death is an inscription of a permanent

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absence and is a remarking of that absence as the space of the other in which writing will now occur. Heretofore in the novel, writing and its avatars have been viewed as a way of recapturing the past, marking it as alive again and reborn in the present. Long ago, Combray was inscribed in Marcel and then forgotten until it was reborn from the accidental contact of a madeleine with some herbal tea, following which, like the Japanese game of pieces of paper, all of Combray is reborn. The prose on the ‘‘bell-towers of Martinville’’ seeks to capture that glimpse permanently, inscribing that momentary presence in writing. The article in Le Figaro is meant to be read and reread by all in order to remark Marcel as author and to congratulate him on its publication. With the inscription of Albertine’s death, both Marcel and the readers realize that writing marks an incontrovertible absence that can never be a recall to presence nor ever be filled. It is thus a rewriting of all space as one of defamiliarization in which the family’s truths can no longer be recovered. Significantly, the passage initially quoted, in which the family apartment has become strange, recalls the discussion of insomnia, familiarity, memory, and defamiliarization with which the novel begins.95 The point at which Albertine’s death is revealed in writing is then is a reversal and upheaval of what has previously occurred throughout, especially since the madeleine episode, for arguably, the pages before the epiphany of the madeleine are under the sign of death and disorder: ‘‘Dead forever? It was possible.’’96 The epiphany restores presence, order, the same, the self, the familiar, and the familial. Thus between the madeleine and the death of Albertine, the momentum of the novel often depends on an activity in which what is strange is inevitably tamed and seen to be familiar: the other is reduced to the known; the unheimlich becomes heimlich, or the other is appropriated into a vastly expanding Familienroman. The Freudian analogy with the dream world will not be lost on any readers: ‘‘Sometimes, in the obscure streets of sleep, I bumped against one of those bad dreams that are not too serious.’’97 Like Freud, Proust recognizes that dreams use the remains of the day along with various processes of distortion. Equally important is the continuation of the geographic metaphor: just as the absence of Albertine leads to a meditation on the streets of the city, the same streets return here in the dream world. The narrator goes on to speculate, in the same paragraph, as to whether or not these dreams are encountered for the first time. Building on the Oedipal structure that formulates the concept of the same, I have invoked two basic Freudian concepts: that of the dream and its processes of distortion and Freud’s sense of the ‘‘uncanny’’ in which that

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which is unknown yet strangely familiar (de´ja` vu) is shown to be part of a repressed system of forgotten memories and affects relating to the primary structures of the self. The Freudian model of the Oedipus complex is certainly not unproblematic, for, as Deleuze and Guattari have suggested in L’Anti-Œdipe, once we move away from the model of the bourgeois family or the family in a world dominated by the bourgeoisie, the historical constructions of the Oedipus complex become apparent. In the roman d’apprentissage, however, the structure and development of the hero depend entirely on those bourgeois structures. Thus a psychoanalysis of Marcel based on Oedipal trauma, though that is certainly a plausible application of psychoanalysis, is not the goal here; rather, with a nod to Lacan, for whom the unconscious is structured like a language, I am proposing that the novel structures the same (the familiar, the familial, identity) like the unconscious mechanism of the Oedipus complex, so that there is ultimately a hidden aspect to what is known in what Jacques Dubois calls ‘‘the black box of the unconscious.’’98 Would a Lacanian reading, depending on alienation through the establishment of the mirror stage, be more conducive here? Perhaps, since the notion of identity depends on a movement into the symbolic and the real that can never fully be decided.99 At the same time, Lacan relies, as Jacques Derrida has admirably shown in ‘‘Le Facteur de la ve´rite´,’’ on the necessity of the letter reaching the reader, and sometimes the postman does not deliver, delivers the wrong letter, or gives the right letter to the wrong person.100 In the Recherche, the literal letter announcing Albertine’s death reaches its destination, but its effect precisely is to disrupt the sense of the real and to introduce the space of negation in which writing will prospectively and retrospectively occur. This is also precisely the point at which the application of psychoanalysis to a literary work or the reading of this novel through psychoanalysis becomes problematic. Proust and Freudian readings would part company, for a psychoanalysis of the novel ignores the novel’s fundamental discovery of the problematic of strangeness. In the novel, for which the project is finally clear, the situation is different from the Freudian uncanny: having gone to bed early for so long and having had dreams that may or may not be repetitive, the narrator must now go on to produce a novel in which the familiar and the unfamiliar are woven into an aesthetic. Put another way, the novel is an ironic mix of the canny and the uncanny, a trope of tropes in the sense that Paul de Man gave to irony. And the mixture is never fully separable. With Albertine’s death, the narrator begins to move away from the model of familiarization into one of defamiliarization. Through the mechanism triggered by mourning, the narrator moves the novel we have been

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reading into the space of production of the novel; the novel moves wholly into the aesthetic. The novel again separates from psychoanalysis through its structuring of the notion of mourning. For Freud, mourning takes place within the familiar, even though it is a sign that the familiar is irrevocably changed into some new avatar of itself. In the Recherche, however, mourning is the liberatory process by which the novel can become itself in the realm of the heterodox. And this is the sense of the literary: Albertine’s death is always aestheticized because it is announced in writing, albeit in the fairly neutral mode of a telegram; it does not exist apart from the words used to describe it. And again, there is a difference between actions of the real author, for whom the novel is in part the melancholic response to the death of his mother, and the literarity of the novel as a product, away from the author (habent sua fata libelli) for which, in a sense, the author is always already dead, and in which the structures of irony and contradiction do not have to obey the laws of the human psyche. This entire segment of the novel, certainly the shortest of the seven parts, is the space of transformation and the three movements (in four chapters) stage that transformation: the death of Albertine is aestheticized and transformed into prose; Venice is visited as the sole locus truly outside the local and familiar locations that form the nexus of the narrator’s personal geography of Paris, Combray, and Balbec.101 Most astonishingly, the fourth chapter of the segment engages the total transformation of characters and geography in which that most macho of characters, Saint-Loup, having married Gilberte, is revealed to be gay and, even more astonishingly, to have taken up with his uncle’s ex-lover, Charlie Morel. This final transformation is at the heart of the problematic of the familiar and the unfamiliar in the novel: both literally and figuratively, it is a return, but the return is to unfamiliar territory to a world that can never be comfortable again and from which Marcel will retire twice. First, he will go to a sanatorium, as if he could somehow recover health and identity (again, we may think here of Die Zauberberg). More importantly, he will retire at a symbolic level to become the writer he has always felt himself to be. And this does not involve a physical retirement, but a negation of worldly self even as he goes out into the world.102 It is not so much what happens in Venice or even the use of Venice as a delaying mechanism for knowledge, but the return and the space of return to the familiar, in a sort of Heimkehr, that will prompt the move into the final part of the novel that is both the text of old age and the text of his own literature put finally on its own altar. The trip to Venice is the fulfillment or completion of the long-held belief that Italy is the country in which magic

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will occur, appearing as early in the novel as the early meditations on Florence and Venice, in which Marcel invests emotionally and intellectually in the magic of naming.103 Yet his magical version of Italy is too much like what he already knows; Italy can only be an illusion of artistic presence. When we arrive in Venice, it is a Venice that exists relative to art but, as we shall soon see, the art is wrong. While functioning as a means of distracting Marcel from his mourning, the trip to Venice is not much more than a delaying tactic that prolongs the realm and the reign of the same. It is marked initially by the familiar and the familial, for it is his mother who takes him to Venice,104 just as his grandmother once took him to Balbec. As different, exotic, and un-French as that city is, a mixture of land and water, of East and West, Venice—or his perception of the city—still returns him to the familiar and for the reasons stated above, he cannot see it for himself, nor can he see it for itself: ‘‘In Venice . . . daily life was no less real than in Combray.’’105 For Venice to work as an aesthetic point, it must be different, but if the narrator is capable of recognizing the need for difference, he is quite incapable of doing anything about it. Recognizing the need is the first step in the transition, transformation, and reversal, but it is not that conversion itself. His complaint about previous art is registered but he is still at an impasse: ‘‘Great artists were wrong when, through a quite natural reaction to the artificial Venice of bad painters, they remained attached only to the Venice that they found more realistic, of the humble campi and small abandoned rii. That was what I often explored in the afternoon, if I did not go out with my mother.’’106 If great artists react appropriately by rejecting the too touristy, typical, or stereotypical paintings of the Rialto, San Marco, or the Grand Canal, they do not follow up by producing the unique, rectified, great artistic version of the same, as Proust would have his rhetorical writer do in his cathedralnovel. Rather, they seek out the singular and the miniature, which, if less familiar, do not have the majesty necessary to become different and remarkable; they are nothing more than curiosities. Yet instead of painting or writing the glories of Venice, Marcel seeks the same miniatures and only when he strays from his mother; leaving the familiar for some unknown and unexpected territory, he does not find it on a grand scale but can distance himself only a bit from the familial and the familiar. However, if Venice itself is not the epiphany or turning point, it is the departure from Venice that brings about the transformation, which occurs at the heart of society’s premiere institution, bourgeois heterosexual marriage. It is only when the world is turned upside down by the announced marriages between Saint-Loup and

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Gilberte on the one hand and Cambremer and Jupien’s niece on the other that Marcel can begin to make his break from the past. The sequence starts with an announcement from his mother: ‘‘Oh it is unheard of, my mother said to me. Listen, at my age one gets astonished at nothing, but I assure you that there is nothing more unexpected than the news announced to me in this letter.’’107 Marcel’s mother is astonished, as he will be, and this astonishment is the mechanism for moving into the unknown, significantly, with a literary allusion.108 Of the marriage between Cambremer and Jupien’s niece, whom Charlus has adopted and on whom he has bestowed a family name, making her Mademoiselle d’Oloron, the mother remarks, ‘‘It is the pay-off for virtue. It is a marriage at the end of a novel by Madame Sand.’’109 But in petto, Marcel continues and ironizes his mother’s comment: ‘‘It’s the price of vice; it is the marriage at the end of a novel by Balzac.’’110 Moving away from Combray, away from Venice reread as Combray, and away from the bucolic novels of George Sand, the narrative moves into the ironic of the familiar made unfamiliar, the double trope of dreams, the realm of the reversal, and the realm of the homosexual.111 With that move, three things begin to be reformulated: sexual identities, heterosexual relationships, and internalized geography. The reversal has occurred but not without an ironic twist that is a kind of double bind that perhaps only literature can solve: in being astonished, Marcel mimes his mother’s astonishment, thereby remaining within the realm of the same. So it is only with a silent correction that immediately distances him from the familial that he can make his break. And this is where we can impute a return to the autobiographical: if it is the death of Albertine that figures for Marcel instead of the death of the mother, who is very much alive, it is the symbolic overturning of the mother’s discourse within the novel that is the trigger mechanism here. So it is not, as classic author and work criticism would have it, a direct representation of the facts of the author’s life, but rather, the representation and negation of familial discourse. This moment is not only the end of the reign of the familial, but also that of the feminine as the repository of the written. From the very early pages of the scene in which the young Marcel dramatically awaits the maternal kiss that is never to come, through this page, writing has been caught in the feminine, in the person of two women writers, George Sand and Madame de Se´vigne´, the first figuring in the grandmother’s gift and recalled here, the second, constantly quoted and referred to by the grandmother and mother. The literary vehicles for understanding the world through the eyes of the family have been women. In thinking Balzac instead of Sand, Marcel enters

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the realm of male writers, less wholesome perhaps than his family would wish and certainly, by and large, less pastoral as well. And Madame de Se´vigne´, who represents a completely different era from the narrator’s own, is more importantly, the figure of the maternal in French letters; she is dismissed as well. She can no longer be the voice providing quotations and aphorisms; the familial link from mother to daughter (and grandmother to mother) that she represents is broken here, not in favor of a maternal link of mother to son, but in favor of an independent, male author-to-be. Thinking about the fact that neither Charlus nor Saint-Loup has announced marriage plans, even though he has written recently to the latter, Marcel pauses to reflect that perhaps they are not as much his friends as he thought. In the same paragraph in which he reconsiders his friendship to the two Guermantes men, there is a sudden shift in discourses. Marcel evokes the image of a maison de femmes in which more and more, men were increasingly procured as well as women; it is, moreover, the very same house in which Charlus once surprised Morel. As the vehicle of literature has changed from the feminine to the masculine, the vehicle for pleasure has made the same shift: women are replaced by men in a house of assignations.112 Putting the two events in parallel with one another leads to the startling conclusion that the movement away from the maternal and the familial toward an independence of position is ultimately a queered one, just as the house of assignations has moved to a queerer pattern of sexuality. And the parallel is reenforced by an equally strange shift in the narrative. For the narrator has suddenly become omniscient, as if he were not the narrator of the Recherche but almost that of a Balzac novel, yet with a striking difference from Balzac. For this new omniscience is different from that associated with the nineteenth-century narrative that is ‘‘Un Amour de Swann’’; where the latter was a standard, traditional third-person narrative, this new omniscience is in the consciousness of a first-person narrator who is his own protagonist. While not present and not revealing how he comes upon this information, he recounts a conversation between the assistant madam of the house and ‘‘a fat gentleman’’ (un gros Monsieur), in which the former tells the latter about both Saint-Loup’s and Cambremer’s gay leanings. The unnamed ‘‘fat gentleman,’’ who himself is gay, and who sees the two young men quite often at the house of some cousins, does not at all believe the remark and in fact indicates that they are ‘‘the complete contrary of ‘that.’ ’’113 There have been previous instances of Marcel willfully or accidentally overhearing or espying others who are ‘‘caught in the act’’: seeing Mademoiselle Vinteuil and her friend at Montjouvain or creeping through

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space in the Hoˆtel de Guermantes to overhear what winds up being the moans and grunts of sex between Charlus and Jupien; this espionage will be repeated in Jupien’s brothel. But this movement goes beyond that limited one that can be ascribed to the machinations of an author moving his character into an appropriate position for gaining knowledge. Here, the narrator has invisibly and silently entered into a space where he hears a conversation not intended for ears other than those of the two participants in the conversation. It is not difficult to make a leap here that parallels the one in the narration from the restricted first person to the omniscient narrator: the ‘‘fat gentleman’’ is a phantasmatic version of Charlus, a ghost figure that both affirms and denies his presence as it occupies the same locus that he had once occupied with Morel, being gay and not being gay, having knowledge and denying knowledge at the same time. In moving to the position of the writer, Marcel / the narrator moves away from his family as the agency for modeling understanding and toward Charlus: when we read the initial encounter between Charlus and Marcel in Balbec, where the latter takes the former for a spy or a madman and where Charlus fakes taking notes, we little suspect that this will be the actualization of that long ago event. Moreover, this shift in narration and in contents is essential to the transformation of the novel: the loci of knowledge and nonknowledge somehow have to coalesce. So if this is to become the cathedral-novel, the Proustian narrator will have to figure out a position that goes beyond the ubiquity and the omniscience of the Balzacian narrator. And it is precisely that, for the position of the Balzacian narrator qua narrator and not merely as commentator offering his (or Balzac’s) opinions is one that necessarily excludes subjectivity, generally excludes the use of the first person, and denies any possibility of personalized aesthesis. While Proust does not want to return to George Sand and thereby return to childhood gifts of novels along with his less complex understanding of life in and out of them, he needs now to go past Balzac in order to complete the aesthetic transformation of the world. A few pages later, Charlus recognizes that he may actually know Cambremer. Charlus muses out loud, but in private, to the Princesse de Parme, that this nephew might be like his uncle and that ‘‘they’’ make the best husbands.114 Thus like the ‘‘gros Monsieur’’ and like the suddenly omniscient narrator, Charlus has special knowledge. The conversation between Charlus and the Princesse de Parme is a wink aimed at the informed reader, for even if the princess does not understand the referent for the ‘‘they’’ in question,

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readers certainly do. But, one wonders, how does the narrator read Charlus’s mind and overhear this very private conversation? In any case, the narrator soon makes Charlus’s comment his own: ‘‘Homosexuals would be the best husbands in the word if they didn’t play the game of loving women.’’115 It is Charlus’s comment with an ironic twist, evidence of this master trope that will form the basis for the rest of the novel, that will be written under the sign of that rhetoric. If the me´salliances shock Marcel’s mother, they are nonetheless part of the nobles’ world that depends more and more on money instead of land. But it is not only the marriage of Saint-Loup and Gilberte or that of Cambremer and Mademoiselle d’Oloron; it is also, and perhaps more importantly, this shift in sexual tension. And if Gilberte seems not to be bothered about her husband’s infidelities or if she is aware of their specific nature,116 the narrator, as Marcel, introduces himself into the story as the one hurt or betrayed. As I have indicated, upon learning of the marriage, he questions the nature of the friendship. But after Saint-Loup has strayed, it is Marcel who unceremoniously casts himself into the role of the wounded spouse: Personally, I was completely indifferent on a moral level whether one find pleasure with a man or a woman, and I thought it too natural and human that one seek it where one might find it. If then Robert had not been married, his relations with Charlie should not have caused me any trouble. And yet I recognized that what I felt would have been as sharp had he remained a bachelor.117

So instead of being the central figure in the Familienroman that takes us from Paris, Combray, and Balbec to Venice and back again to France, Marcel assumes his role as creative force. He becomes a novelist by undergoing this radical transformation into a betrayed heterosexual wife. Yet as he is precisely a male, it is not as heterosexual as it seems: he is the betrayed husband/ wife in a strangely queered relationship that now marks all others in the novel. It is a sign of what the narrator calls a ‘‘physiological evolution.’’ He uses the phrase to characterize Robert’s change from skirt-chasing heterosexual to someone who, at least in part, finds sexual pleasure with another man: ‘‘But I was convinced that Saint-Loup’s physiological evolution had not started at that time [Balbec] and that he still liked only women then.’’118 A few pages later, the same phrase reappears, attached both to a kind of genealogical imperative in which Robert moves ‘‘from his father’s tastes to those

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of his uncle’’ (des gouˆts de son pe`re a` ceux de son oncle)119 as well as to a similitude: there is a resemblance between Charlie and Rachel, compounded by an almost perfect anagram between their names. Resemblances appear where none had been expected; coordinations and rapprochements occur where none had been seen before. This all occurs through the mechanism of changing paradigms for the narration. Thus this change or ‘‘physiological evolution’’ mentioned twice occurs in the narrator as well. As he evolves psychologically and physiologically, the bodily traces reinscribing the mnesic ones that will have been written as the text are recorded in the material world outside of him, the most notable examples of which are the changes in perception of geography, long hinted at, but only now fully explained. The simple division of the world in the country into the two ‘‘ways,’’ a division that has already been challenged in the most obvious way by the marriage of Gilberte and Saint-Loup, has still not been fully recorded for the narrator as the record of that changing world. And although one would be hard-pressed to find this naive geography believable, it can be if we suspend our disbelief relative to a compromising chronology. Marcel marks these changes by using the word with which his mother begins the section: ‘‘astonish.’’ In conversations with Gilberte, ‘‘several times she astonished me,’’ again, ‘‘another astonishment,’’ and finally: And the third time was when Gilberte said to me: ‘‘If you wish, we can still go out one afternoon and we can go to Guermantes, by following the path to Me´se´glise, that is the prettiest way,’’ a sentence that in upsetting all the ideas of my childhood taught me that the two ways were not as irreconcilable as I had believed. But what struck me the most was how little, during this stay, I relived yesteryear, little desired to see Combray, found the Vivonne narrow and ugly.120

With the exception of the staggered, arrested, or perverted chronology, the revelation of the insolite is all there. The familiar world of childhood has been shown to be built on illusions: geographic illusions that Guermantes and Tansonville were noncompossible, that the Vivonne was some miracle, and that one could not get to Guermantes by Me´se´glise or vice versa. There are psychological illusions too that the world was a reflection of the family and its family values, its way of doing things, its raison d’eˆtre for eating late, so different from the far more worldly reason used in Tansonville, ‘‘One [On] now ate late at Tansonville at an hour at which, formerly, one was already long asleep [depuis longtemps] in Combray.’’121 One might very well ask who this ‘‘on’’ is, for the presence of the key word ‘‘longtemps’’ brings to

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mind more insomnia or a child not sleeping, waiting in vain for his mother, finally getting a George Sand novel, albeit precipitously early. The world is not the recapitulated world of Marcel’s childhood, one momentarily made strange by the father’s peregrinations only to rediscover the back door to the house. It is a world that is totally different from childhood, in which childhood is left far behind. Marcel has finally become an adult, broken with his mother, and finished mourning the past that, once rediscovered, becomes the fodder for the work of art as memorial text. This is the sense of that staggered chronology: after having remained a child for the longest period of time, Marcel finally skips over the barrier of evolutionary physiology to become not simply an adult, but a middle-aged man glimpsed in the famous matine´e in the last volume of the work. Whereas all others had grown and aged, Marcel seemed bound to the past for the longest time. And even if aging in the novel is sometimes not verisimilar (as for Charlus and Odette), it is important for the chronology of the narrator-becomingauthor, the narrator who, in a surprising (or not so surprising) move in the last volume actually situates the narrated events in the real future, projected several years beyond what we know is the real time of writing of the work; here we come to know the death of the author in a very real moment. What then is the sense of the astonishing discoveries? The gist of it comes from the astonishment produced by the prestidigitating Gilberte, the muse of the feminine whose double the narrator has become of late. Gilberte inspires: ‘‘It is as if she had said to me: ‘Turn left, then right, and you will touch the intangible, you will reach unreachable distances whose direction alone is known on earth.’ ’’122 Touching the intangible through a queered identity is the final sense of the transformation in this turning point in the novel; after that, the novel that has been written can be written, that touchable intangible that had remained so long a foreign country, now introduced as permanently other within the realm of the same. To finish, it is meet to examine the penultimate paragraph, in which, as episodic literature used to say, ‘‘all is revealed’’: ‘‘My heart leapt with desire and regret when I thought of the basements of Roussainville. Still I was happy to tell myself that the happiness toward which all my forces then tended and that nothing could give to me, had existed elsewhere than in my thought, in reality so close to me, in that Roussainville of which I often spoke, that I saw from the little room smelling of orris root.’’123 Time rediscovered will be the fulfillment of that initial promise, the flow out of the body returned to it, the novel with which the narrator will have struggled so long, only to give birth in a queered reprisal of that initial masturbatory fantasy.

4.

Sartre’s Bodies

This quantity of vulgar unemployed men, retired members of the middle class, widowers, solicitors without jobs, schoolboys who came to copy their essay, maniacal old me—like the pathetic Carnaval who came every day in a red, light blue, or apple green suit, and a hat adorned with flowers—undoubtedly merits consideration, but are there not other libraries, and even special libraries, to open for them? Nerval, ‘‘Ange´lique’’

Sartre’s Autodidacticism In the film Sartre par lui-meˆme, directed by Alexandre Astruc and Michel Contat, Jean-Paul Sartre, along with the fastest talker in the universe, Simone de Beauvoir, reminisces about his life, work, and engagement in the politics and culture of the twentieth century. In telling that there was a reallife model for the Autodidact, Sartre allows that part of the model was himself: The first time I talked about contingency was in a notebook I had found in the subway. It was a new notebook, with ‘‘Midy Suppositories’’ writing on it; it was obviously a notebook given to doctors. It was made like a register, with A, B, C, D, etc., and—it was perhaps this that gave me the idea to make the Autodidact, one of the characters of Nausea, a man who learns alphabetically—I put my thoughts in alphabetical order, for a simple reason, that there was an alphabetical order in that register.1

The editors of the Ple´iade edition of Sartre’s fictions recount the anecdote with even greater precision: ‘‘We know that one of the characteristics of the Autodidact is to put his thoughts and especially those of others carefully in a notebook. Relative to that, let us remember that around 1922 and 1923, Sartre did the same thing in a notebook he had found in the metro, with 169

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‘Midy Suppositories’ written on it.’’2 But something is amiss: Midy suppositories did not appear on the market until 1938, the year of publication of La Nause´e. So if Sartre wrote about contingency in 1922 or 1923 it certainly was not in so anal retentive a notebook. This anachronism does provide a nice means of discussing the character of the autodidact, as the representation of that character does depend, in the end, on straight-shooting and classification in anal-retentive, alphabetical order.3 In an earlier study, in Alcibiades at the Door, I focused on the visual component to male homosexuality in Sartre’s writing, a kind of scopophilia necessary for him to guarantee the existence of the category through a perception of ‘‘the’’ act and essential to his analyses of the matter. This chapter will not be a change of paradigm but rather a change of perspective with an analysis of the affects of homosexuality as it is articulated through and around the character of the Autodidact, followed by an analysis of the woman’s body, as Sartre figures it, in bad faith, in ‘‘Intimite´,’’ one of the lesser studied stories in Le Mur. In La Nause´e, the Autodidact is ostensibly gay, one of several such characters in his work; as all readers of Sartre know, he was fascinated with the articulations of male and female homosexuality, though in different ways. Characters in works from Les Chemins de la liberte´ to Huisclos turn out to be queer. And the matter makes its way into his philosophy as well: the third example of bad faith in L’Eˆtre et le ne´ant focuses on a gay man who confesses his homosexuality to a straight friend. Sartre considers both individuals to be in bad faith: the gay man should not have to confess to anyone and the straight man is in no position to forgive, accept, or pardon him. And Sartre’s literary analysis of Jean Genet’s prose focuses as well to a great extent on the bad faith that comes out of Genet’s twin problematic of crime and homosexuality. As far as ‘‘Intimite´’’ is concerned, it is text that puts into perspective Sartre’s vision of women and women’s bodies. As will be seen, Sartre detours the possibilities of verisimilitude in this short story because of his heterocentric and male-dominated vision of reality in which all figures other than straight men are cast in problematic positions. Sartre’s constructions of sexualities other than the most traditional male heterosexuality are fraught with the same subversions of verisimilitude that have already been discussed in this book. In the two examples below, the Autodidact’s sexuality in La Nause´e and female heterosexuality in the form of Lulu in ‘‘Intimite´,’’ Sartre arrives at somewhat monstrous figures in which the combination of familiarity and defamiliarization put any straightforward reading of the works into question. In La Nause´e, to start with, the pivotal and contrasting figure to Roquentin’s existential crisis is none other

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than the Autodidact, truly the only well-limned figure in the novel aside from Roquentin himself. Rather than being a full-fledged character, Anny is an affect of Roquentin’s and Sartre’s misogyny, as well as Sartre’s ‘‘phallonormative model of masculinity,’’ as Lawrence D. Kritzman so aptly puts it.4 In any case, she is seen mostly retrospectively as a site of melancholia and loss, so much so that the scene with her is a rewriting and reinscription of the pain of the past.5 With the Autodidact, Sartre creates one of his first important homosexual figures (there is also a strong dose of homoeroticism in certain stories in Le Mur) for whom there is no real psychological or situational explanation. Same-sex desire is thus initially pitched as another component of the Heideggerian and Sartrean concept of being thrown into the world, the Geworfenheit that Sartre will translate into absurdity, although this component is one that can lead to opprobrium in the form of what the late twentieth century somewhat all too easily labels homophobia, be it external or internalized. While those words can often be misleading and misused, external homophobia can be defined as moral opprobrium from another directed toward a homosexual individual (or someone perceived to be such, whether it is the case or not). Internalized homophobia would describe a situation in which a homosexual individual has consciously or unconsciously taken in the negative image that society often paints of the homosexual and of homosexuality; that internalized mechanism would be seen psychologically in some forms of self-loathing. In L’Eˆtre et le ne´ant, Sartre would soon classify such behavior as one form of bad faith involving the pour autrui: what the homosexual is for others, s/he expresses as his/her own identity, as if that were the pour soi. Even more than Daniel in Les Chemins de la liberte´, the classic example of the self-loathing homosexual in Sartre’s work is Ine`s in Huis-clos. The Autodidact, it will turn out, is much a Baudelairean ‘‘bourreau de soimeˆme’’; he is also a mental masturbator and an intellectual autoeroticist who attempts to fill what he perceives as voids, gaps, blanks, or lacks in himself with the words of others.6 These are attempts to plug his gap, one shared by Roquentin: the nausea within him, the gap of emptiness, the alienation from self, the absurdity of existence, or the void; it is the locus where language must go but in which it can never fulfill the promise of plenitude. These are so many metaphors for the absence of meaning, certainly not always sexual; they nevertheless function according to a mechanism of the metaphysics of desire. While Roquentin may try to fill his emptiness by engaging his own nausea or by nostalgically returning, albeit farcically, to

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Anny, the less advanced Autodidact tries to fill his gap or gape with mental masturbation, fraternity, and ultimately, pederasty or ephebophilia. The very first image presented of the Autodidact is a well-crafted, pointed, and dehumanizing characterization: ‘‘I saw an unknown face, hardly a face. And then there was his hand, like a fat white worm, in my hand.’’7 Unrecognizable as a person or even as a part of a person, the Autodidact has always already been transformed into a fleshy, phallic monster lying flaccid in Roquentin’s hand. A handshake, which is the simplest form of greeting, morphs into a masturbatory, homosexual moment in which Roquentin is forced to caress the Autodidact’s limp phallus, displaced into his hand. This displacement will become important in the final episode involving the Autodidact, in which he reaches out and caresses the adolescent. So at that latter point, he is not just making an improper advance with his hand, which itself would be problematic, but he is also forcing his displaced phallus onto the adolescent, an act that, at least metaphorically, is an act of indecent exposure or molestation.8 The image of extension and retraction is repeated in the library, as the Autodidact turns from reading his current volume in ‘‘L’’ to contemplating a high school student next to him: ‘‘He looked, smiling, at his neighbor on the right, a filthy high schooler who often came to the Library. The other let himself be contemplated for a moment, then suddenly stuck out his tongue while making a horrible face. The Autodidact blushed, shoved his nose quickly into his book, and got absorbed in his reading.’’9 A penetrating look on the part of the Autodidact is followed by a sign of male bravura and teenage iconoclasm, as the student sticks out his tongue, an insulting gesture to be sure. If we remember the flaccidity and the interchangeability of the Autodidact’s body parts, as if they were so many disjecta membra, not integral parts of a whole individual, that metamorphosis can be generalized to all characters in the novel: the reader should remember Roquentin’s study of his own face in the mirror or his own hand as an ‘‘animal on its back,’’10 as well as the latter’s future transformation into or (dis)identification with the root of the chestnut tree. With its tensed muscles, the teenager’s tongue is briefly an erect phallus that repels the longing glance or the amorous attack of the Autodidact. It is a sign of male territoriality and the figure of alphamale dominance: the extended erect tongue repels the Autodidact, pushing him toward and within himself, and it forces his own amorous attention back on himself. The Autodidact blushes; his head turns red, thereby permitting a momentary conflation with the redheaded Roquentin and allowing for a momentary queering of Roquentin through similarity that will play

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out later as guilt by association, when the library guard asks Roquentin if he too is a ‘‘fag’’ (tante). The Autodidact retreats: he puts ‘‘his’’ nose into ‘‘his’’ book. But that book, as we know, is that which is gradually becoming part of him. He plunges his nose into himself, in an act of autoeroticism that turns, depending on what angle one takes, into an act of self-buggery. Language morphs characters’ bodies into the hallucinatory and the imaginary. Somewhat later, the Autodidact hints that ‘‘something horrible has happened to me’’ and that the guard at the library is somehow involved, but that he will not tell Roquentin the story in front of the guard.11 Witnessing implicates a reinscription of the scurrilous event and moving away from the sexualized locus of the library might allow the Autodidact to forget the reality, to bury his actions, or to translate them—as he will do—into a lofty, noble discourse of desexualized fellowship. Instead, he invites Roquentin to lunch the following Wednesday. The invitation is made with the following description of a character somewhat akin to Proust’s Charlus: ‘‘He blushed and his hips swayed gracefully.’’12 Blush for blush: now when inviting Roquentin on a date, earlier when having been caught leering perversely at the high school student, whom Roquentin has already indicated is not a suitable object of desire because he is ‘‘filthy.’’ Thus does the Autodidact shift, albeit briefly, his lustful attention to Roquentin, the arbiter of taste, knowledge, and seemingly boys as well. Though the Autodidact cannot read Roquentin’s mind, he can certainly feel the necessity to displace desire and perhaps even to do away with it. This displaced desire, then, moving uncomfortably from body to body and sexuality to sexuality, becomes a figure of this turn in the verisimilar so necessary if the author is to make his philosophical points in this roman a` the`se. One of the key scenes for understanding the turn of the novel is the scene in Roquentin’s room in which he has been remembering past events as he is transported to other times and other places. As he is lying there with the lights are off, he is roused by a knock at the door. The Autodidact enters and sits down: He sits on a chair; his tight buttocks touch the back and his stiff chest sticks out. I jump off the bed and turn on the light: ‘‘What’s up, sir? We were fine.’’13

The room is lit enough for Roquentin to notice the Autodidact’s behind, but the focus on that part of the body is initially unexpected. Sartre has deliberately sexualized the scene by stiffening the Autodidact’s bust, and

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moving it forward presents the front part of the guest’s body as if it were a hard phallus. Similarly, pushing his buttocks back into a chair seems to be a thrust of his behind. As in the situation in the library in which he symbolically commits an act of self-buggery, the Autodidact takes both roles in a situation of simulated anal intercourse. The inscription of that scene threatens the overly heterosexual Roquentin, who not minutes before has been thinking about his past and, in part, his past with Anny; this is a queer interruption into heterosexual nostalgia, and again, this interruption is also a rupture of the seams of the novel. Finding himself in a dark room with a man who is attracted to other men is too problematic for Roquentin, who needs to turn on the light to extricate himself from a seemingly compromising situation. It little matters that no one would see, whatever the ambiguity. Roquentin is pressed, afraid, and worried about himself, not about the Autodidact. Arguably, Roquentin fears his own possible homosexuality, in what Kritzman calls Roquentin’s ‘‘inability to come to terms with the dangers of homoerotic desire and the challenges of bisexuality.’’14 One might very well raise two objections here: the first is that Roquentin does not ‘‘know’’ that the Autodidact is homosexual, and the second is that this is an overreading of a simple or innocent action. Yet Sartre knows in Roquentin’s stead that the Autodidact is homosexual and he does nothing to disambiguate the scene for Roquentin: he could have left the lights on for his narrator/protagonist; he could have had Roquentin not muse on his heterosexual past; he could have had Roquentin remember his rendezvous with the Autodidact; he could have had the Autodidact sit differently. Sartre’s choices are willful and his construction of the scene queers the entry into the private space of Roquentin’s bedroom. It is a space that is now potentially and dangerously the locus of a migration or mutation of that solipsistic, masturbatory, and heterosexual nostalgia into a coupled queerness. Moreover, given the time and place in which the novel is set, it would have been extremely unlikely for a nonintimate to enter someone’s bedroom. Rather they would have met in a cafe´, with Roquentin having brought his photographs and postcards to a neutral, public location. So this scene is quite odd in its own way. At the same time, Sartre lets the Autodidact bathe briefly in his illusion. The Autodidact has clearly already thought or at least unconsciously felt that being in the dark with Roquentin is a good thing. The Autodidact has formed a bond in the shadows; they have, in his mind, formed a ‘‘we’’ and that ‘‘we’’ is in a good place. While the Autodidact is not necessarily imagining any sexual congress with Roquentin, he has, at least in terms of emotional proxemics, gotten closer to the latter. And even when the light is on,

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as soon as the pictures are shared, the Autodidact will repeat his forward gesture. Just as he has entered Roquentin’s private space and thrust his torso forward, he now juts out his jaw, which Sartre qualifies with the ironic biblical reference to the jawbone of an ass; yet the Autodidact is anything but Samson-like.15 As Sartre or Roquentin oralizes the Autodidact—the author is sketching the picture of a stereotypical bottom—Roquentin heads into the world of sexual fantasy, as he displaces the present, not into the past but into the exotic, configuring the Autodidact thinking about Samoyeds and Tierra del Fuegans. But Roquentin does not merely stop at displacing things geographically, he fantasizes a sexuality that many would say violates taboos far more than mere homosexuality does: ‘‘The exotic figures pair off randomly, mother and son, father and daughter, brother and sister, mutilate each other, castrate each other, stretch their lips with saucers, have monstrous animals carved on their hips.’’16 ‘‘Monstrous’’ is the precise word, for it is easier for Roquentin to entertain thoughts about heterosexual incest and castration than to engage the question of his own possible homosexual penchants or at least his sexuality being put momentarily into question. As safe figures of comforting heterosexuality, castration and incest replace the unspeakable homosexuality that Roquentin has just flashed on and rejected. There will be one more thrust in this short scene, after Roquentin reveals the truth of the Autodidact and regrets having done so because it must be ‘‘a secret delirium.’’17 He has shown the Autodidact’s truth to himself, outing him intellectually and demonstrating the truth in his mind; it is as if he were revealing the truth of his sexuality to him. And the Autodidact’s response, yet again, is to thrust part of his body forward, this time, his lips.18 The movement has narrowed itself over the course of these pages from bust to jaw and then to lips. The forwardness of the thrust described by Sartre is unmistakable, as the arc of the movement pushes the Autodidact toward an act of fellatio with Roquentin. The more the latter penetrates him—and by revealing his deepest, darkest secrets—the more the Autodidact moves toward performing oral sex on Roquentin. In marking the text as an illustration of philosophical positions, Sartre has to move the work away from the verisimilar and toward the imaginary or the phantasmatic. Finally, it is the Autodidact’s entire self that moves in for the act as he asks Roquentin if the latter has had ‘‘aventures.’’19 While this word can quite simply mean ‘‘adventures,’’ it also has the specific meaning of sexual escapades, one-night stands, anonymous tricks, or encounters. If Roquentin chooses to understand the question in the general sense, the specific sexual meaning is not lost on the reader who surmises that this is where the textual unconscious is

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headed and where the real and emotional proxemics have also been heading. The Autodidact is now so close that Roquentin can smell his bad breath. The event is over, and bad simulated sex has come to an end, not a moment too soon. This rereading of the scene in Roquentin’s room in a new light is an illustration of the ways in which Sartre bends his representations, inscriptions, and interpretations to force meaning into certain categories, to create situations of bad faith, to mark the text as endlessly focusing on the traumatics of the pour autrui in particular. The text is inflected in order to produce key positions that engage the questions of existence, which Sartre is moving away from the mirrors of verisimilar representation. At any given point in the novel, especially noticeable in the scenes that made the novel famous— the chestnut tree, the stone, the mirror, among others—Sartre is devalorizing the directly representational and he reinserts meaning through the strangeness of representation but also, has just been seen, and, as will follow, in a queering of the space of interpersonal representation. Fundamentally then, Sartre sacrifices the directly mimetic in order to produce a text, even given the contingency and the aleatory nature of the existential. And he does so to point his readers, not so much toward a questioning of the absurdity of existence, but toward a questioning of the structuring of the given. Eighty pages after the scene in Roquentin’s room, it is time for lunch. Two things should be noted in passing before an examination of the scene with the two hapless figures. First, the obvious must be stated: as the scene in the restaurant continues the orality of the photograph scene but will add to it with several perverse twists including, at the very least, the Autodidact’s intense determination, albeit out of a misguided sense of politesse, to decide exactly what Roquentin puts in his mouth. And second, the scene in the restaurant happens the same day as the scene that is focused on the existential illumination provided by the chestnut tree root. It is a double realization, a double illumination, and a double nausea. If the scene of the chestnut tree root has often been seen as the culminating point of the novel’s philosophical trajectory, that is true; yet it is preceded by the restaurant scene and ultimately followed by the final scene in the library, the only scene in which Roquentin truly takes action. The nausea depicted in the chestnut tree scene continues the nausea of the restaurant scene; the actions of the final scene in the library stand in opposition to all previous moments of stasis and paralysis. The long scene in the restaurant is an excuse for the author to allow Roquentin to reflect in general about human existence and to produce an

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implicit and explicit critique of a kind of weak socialism/humanism of the sort to which the Autodidact adheres. This socialism seems to be based in a shared fellowship, a kind of idyllic, primitive Christianity that has no real sense of politics or class. The scene is explicitly constructed for Roquentin to be able to expatiate on his ideas, for he indicates that he was looking forward to seeing the Autodidact and that he needed to talk. Of interest in particular here are the ways in which the figurations of the Autodidact’s sexuality continue to bubble to the surface, despite the fact that Sartre seems not yet to be clear about whether the Autodidact is attracted to Roquentin or, as will be the case the following week, he is attracted to adolescents. Sartre’s confusion may be willful or not, but it seems likely that he turned a blind eye to nuances of homosexual difference and that, for him, a pederast is a pederast is a pederast, in particular, because, as has already been indicated, his concept of sexuality seems to give primacy to male heterosexuality and lump all other sexualities together. What is certain is that Sartre places the scene under the sign of the abject, the petty, and the provincial: the scene starts with Roquentin killing a fly for no apparent reason, despite the humane protest of the Autodidact. The white innards come out of the fly’s abdomen, guts that strangely resemble the Autodidact’s worm-like white hand. This is a strange way to start a food scene, to say the least. As for the food, there is no manly, phallic sausage for Roquentin; the Autodidact insists on only invertebrate snails or if not snails, oysters. No manly red meat of a bœuf en daube for him, but rather the less manly poulet chasseur, while the Autodidact permits himself to order the beef. And there is not even robust red wine, but rather the less manly rose´ d’Anjou. The most telling moment in the scene, however, is the missing conversation that happens right after the food is ordered. The purpose of the lunch was ostensibly for the Autodidact to tell Roquentin about the trouble the Corsican guard in the library is making for him. At this point, the naive or the first-time reader will probably not know what is going on, but we all recognize that what the guard has said, hinted, or somehow implied is that the Autodidact is gay. What would have led the guard to this conclusion? Lingering stares or actions by the Autodidact? Untoward comments? A gut reaction? Effeminacy? Gaydar? It is difficult to say, but in any case, the Autodidact cannot bring up the situation and merely settles for saying that the story consists of rumors. In any case, this is the day for the truth; this will be the day of the chestnut tree. So Sartre cannot have the Autodidact speak the love that dare not

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speak its name, for that would put Roquentin in an extremely difficult position. If the Autodidact explains the rumors while either confirming or denying them, Roquentin will have to take verbal action, either accepting the confession, rebuking it, tolerating homosexuality or false heterosexuality, or even not deciding. All of these choices are problematic because each would put him in a situation of moral superiority to the Autodidact, either now or later as he reflects on existence, on nausea, and on the chestnut tree root; given what readers know Sartre is about to do, that moral superiority is impossible. Now, as has just been seen, the important thing is for existence to be put into question as the founding notion of the coming epistemology and ontology: it is a new version of Cartesian doubt that will set everything in motion. Here there is not just doubt but absurdity and nihilism that serve as the base for reconstructing the sense of existence. Killing the fly is doing it a favor, indicates Roquentin at the beginning of the scene. For the purposes of the narrative, the existential solution is not yet to be found and Roquentin must remain in a nihilist funk, far from the humanist existentialism that he and Sartre will eventually embrace. The Autodidact’s humanism is more than directly based on Christian fellowship and the sort of socialism that marks Le´on Blum’s government and the Popular Front in 1936 and 1937; Roquentin specifically says, ‘‘In passing, I salute Catholic humanism from which the Autodidact borrowed this formula, albeit without knowing.’’20 This is a nice little Hail Mary—‘‘Je vous salue Marie’’—from the atheist. Most importantly, this position gives the Autodidact a vocabulary he can safely use to talk with impunity about others. So it is necessary to love people. And it allows for what we know is an act of self-deception: ‘‘ ‘How can you pin a man down,’ says the Autodidact, ‘say that he is this or that? Who can exhaust a man? Who can known a man’s resources?’ ’’21 In an inversion of an inversion, the Autodidact seems to be miming the position or situation of the author himself: one cannot name a man by saying he is this or that, because the naming can never exhaust him, explain everything.22 But it is not really Sartre’s own position, because that is determined by change—an individual is always changing— and by existence; there is no essence that can be known until after the change has stopped, that is, until after the individual has died. Refusing to see that Roquentin’s position depends on contingency and existence, the Autodidact is determined that there be an essence, and specifically, a secret essence that is multilayered, multifarious, and unsoundable. He is determined that part of this essence remain a secret, one known to him and undoubtedly to his god. This means first that this humanistically

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determined core or essence—an en soi—is fundamental to human nature for the Autodidact and that whatever is contingent—everything for Roquentin—is only tangential and accidental for the Autodidact. For him, there is an unchanging and unchanged nature in each individual, and it is undoubtedly that Aristotelian essence that reaches out to others in humanity and in friendship. Second, it relates to the matter at hand: rather than facing some version of self that is as absurd as any other—sexual orientation in this case— some of which may be related to nature, but all of which is as accidentally fixed as any other feature, the Autodidact can compartmentalize it, burying it, not naming it, and metaphorizing it in his humanism. At no point then does he have to face his own otherness to himself and for himself, whereas Roquentin will do so in the scene with the chestnut tree and ultimately ‘‘act,’’ as I have already indicated, after the final incident in the library. While seemingly continuing his lines of thought, Roquentin articulates the slippage and makes a statement that can easily be construed to be about same-sex desire: ‘‘I contemplate the Autodidact with a bit of regret: all week long he indulged himself in imagining this lunch during which he could communicate his love of men to another man. He so seldom has the chance to speak. And look, I spoiled his pleasure.’’23 Even if the Autodidact is not fully out to himself or if he has translated a sexual discourse into an emotional discourse of fraternity, Roquentin does not share the same naivete´ or blindness. He now knows what the Autodidact refuses to know and what cannot be said, and, if he cannot necessarily imagine what will be acted on in a week’s time, his ideas about possible behaviors have been clarified. The scene ends as it has started: with an act of violence. In this case, it is only imagined, as Roquentin thinks of shoving his cheese knife into the Autodidact’s eye, an act that would be followed by an attack on him from the onlookers. If he is stopped, it is not due to the sociopathic nature of the proposed act but rather by the superfluity of all parts of that event. And yet it is a neat frame for the lunch, repeating the violence with which it began, making the inside come out, even if it is with an act of violence. The entire book so far has been about making the inside come out and letting it ooze its way out, so that it is visible on the surface: the nausea is about that as well. Rather than being the banquet of the truth, the lunch is a kind of antisymposium in which the truth remains hidden: Roquentin’s true thoughts and his potential violence, the Autodidact’s homosexuality mistranslated into acceptable fraternity or homosociality, and the fact that there is never any love of man that can come out. And finally, the fantasized stabbing of the Autodidact is a proleptic announcement and displacement of the act of

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violence that is to come: the bloodying of the Autodidact’s nose after the latter has caressed the hand of an adolescent in the library. But I am proceeding too quickly, in imitation of Roquentin’s retrospective announcement of the end of the scene, the first words he writes at the beginning of the scene, a writing to which I shall briefly turn after having looked at the initial explanation set undoubtedly to defuse the reader’s possible shock. After all, this is not the queer twenty-first century but rather provincial, Catholic France in the thirties: ‘‘To tell the truth, I was hardly astonished when the thing happened: for a long time, I felt that his sweet, fearful head would bring about sandal. He was guilty in so small a degree: it was barely sensuality, his humble, contemplative love for young boys, rather a form of humanism.’’24 In writing the summary of the scene up front, Sartre/Roquentin does in fact make a straight apology for what is doubtless not as innocent an act as Roquentin makes it out to be, for the act is certainly a violation of personal space and nonconsensual activity on the person of a minor. And even if nothing results and even if minima non curat lex (the Autodidact is not going to be arrested for a de´lit) Roquentin does recognize that this is not a guiltless action; he finds the Autodidact ‘‘guilty in so small a degree.’’ Still that guilt is there. This minimum defense in which he calls it ‘‘barely sensuality’’ and ‘‘contemplative love’’ prejudices the reader perhaps in favor of the Autodidact, but it is certainly not the truth of the situation. Telling the tale retrospectively, Roquentin retains the image of the blood he had imagined exactly one week earlier. He then feels compelled to write and goes to the cafe´ to do so: whereas he had stopped writing and whereas in the library he had merely been reading the Journal de Bouville for the first time since having abandoned his project on the Marquis de Rollebon, Roquentin now needs to narrate. Writing on pages that are part of yet separate from his diary, he recognizes that writing has to involve something or someone living and not a dead marquess who has turned into an en soi. Writing is writing about a crisis. And finally, before the scene opens, this mention of the act of writing connects the preamble of the scene to the two actions with which Roquentin begins his part of the scene: he returns two books to the assistant librarian and he sits down at the table. ‘‘The Bouville paper was lying on the table,’’ he says. ‘‘I stuck out my hand and took it.’’25 Whereas his reaching out does nothing but get him the newspaper, a similar action by the Autodidact provokes—is—the crisis. Framed by Roquentin’s retrospective reading of the entire scene, the Autodidact’s own entrance at the end of the afternoon is also framed in tragic tones in Roquentin’s mind, as he thinks, ‘‘I see him for the last time.

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Tomorrow evening’’ (Je le vois pour la dernie`re fois. Demain soir),26 which is clearly an echo of Phe`dre’s entrance line: ‘‘Sun, I come to see you for the last time’’ (Soleil, je te viens voir pour la dernie`re fois). This reference then is from the tragic protagonist of a play about illicit love and arguably also about a kind of hidden homosexuality in the person of the chaste Hippolytus. In referring the attentive reader back to Racine, Sartre/Roquentin underlines the inevitability of what is going to happen. From the very beginning of the novel, the Autodidact has been hurtling down a path toward this inevitable conclusion, a theme that is played out in repeated comments by Roquentin: ‘‘Yet from that moment on, I had the impression that a disagreeable event was going to occur’’; ‘‘What increased my curiosity and my discomfort, was that the others were expecting it too’’; I felt clearly that the drama was going to explode: they all wanted it to explode’’; ‘‘The Autodidact did not look surprised. It had to have been years that he was waiting for this conclusion. He must have imagined a hundred times what was going to happen.’’27 Whether it is a projection on the part of Roquentin that this is fated or whether it is a correct reading of the Autodidact’s mind, it is certain that this view of the Autodidact’s behavior culpabilizes homosexuality while trying to save it from condemnation. Homosexuality is depicted not just as sexual behavior between two individuals of the same sex but also, despite the Sartrean idea of freedom, guilty behavior. Perhaps it is not fundamentally and existentially guilty, perhaps it is only a misdemeanor (de´lit), but it is not as guilt-free in this novel as the heterosexual relationships and events that Sartre has Roquentin describe with overwhelming banality and a dryness of tone elsewhere in the novel. And in that, it is also a measure of the misogyny through which the author sees women as a reflection of or a tool for a man’s pleasure. In any case, homosexuality, though ubiquitous, is anything but banal; it is always an event. As Roquentin narrows his focus by pointing the reader toward the event, and as he telescopes his vision to see what is out there, his vision literally and figuratively contrasts with that of the Autodidact whose own is consistently out of focus. After the two teenagers enter, Roquentin repeatedly refers to them as ‘‘young boys’’ (jeunes garc¸ons), although ‘‘jeunes gens’’ would have been more accurate and less scandalous, as he indicates that they are colle´giens. At first, after the two adolescents enter, the Autodidact ‘‘stared at them with a tired look.’’28 If it is a penetrating glance, it is also a tired one that betrays a weariness, perhaps about his own game and martyrdom, or perhaps it is a weariness of hiding who he is. The look quickly changes as he locks eyes with one of the young men: ‘‘He was leaning over his young

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neighbor, staring into his eyes, and smiling at him. I saw him move his lips, and from time to time, his long eyelashes fluttered. I had never seen that youthful look in him; he was almost charming. But from time to time, he interrupted himself and threw a worried glance behind him. The boy seemed to drink up his words.’’29 This is what is vulgarly referred to as ‘‘undressing someone with one’s eyes.’’ For Roquentin, however, the process is transformational, and the Autodidact becomes other to him and undoubtedly other to himself. This scene of seduction involves words unheard by one and drunk in by another. It frames two visions: the locked eyes of the seduction and a literally retrospective glance at the outside world that is perhaps witnessing the action, policing it as it were, and about to condemn it. In glancing behind himself, the Autodidact splits his vision and his focus, just as the perception of the words he speaks is divided: seen by the narrator and heard by the adolescents. At the very least, this means that Roquentin is safe from the seduction and not the object of lust for an aging and unattractive homosexual man about to prey on a teenager. Yet, one wonders what the Autodidact could be saying. For he has not yet, during the course of almost two hundred pages, evinced any oratorical talent; in fact, he has shown minimal communicative skills heretofore. Is he repeating some sententious remarks that he has read or written down? Is he flirting by means of marivaudage? Is he whispering sweet nothings? All we can know is that it is an act of seduction and transfixing. He does not seduce through the contents but through the form. The seduction is complicated by the countercurrent that Sartre introduces. The hand of the teenager supposedly rapt by the Autodidact’s words slides along surreptitiously to pinch the arm of his friend, yet, mine de rien, he continues to appear interested in the words of Autodidact; it may thus all be a game. The blond friend, who is older and already has ‘‘a show of a mustache’’30 and is strapping or broad-shouldered (‘‘raˆble´’’), is, however, truly caught up in the words of the Autodidact, for Sartre indicates that he is enjoying them immensely: the word used is ‘‘jouir.’’31 Words no longer just serve to describe objects, individuals, and actions from a phenomenological point of view; Sartre seems to express the previously unthinkable idea that the blond adolescent may wittingly or unwittingly be gay and that, quite simply, the Autodidact may have chosen the wrong teenager on whom to focus his attention and ardor. Even if the jouissance of the older adolescent does not last, at the end of the scene, lingering doubts remain and readers can never be fully satisfied about the dynamics of the seduction.

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Roquentin reads the situation and interpellates a jouissance that has arrived out of nowhere into the mind of the older teenager; once again the position of narration penetrates where it could not otherwise have gone. And while Roquentin is safe from seduction by the Autodidact, now that he is safely ensconced in his own heterosexuality, he will now describe the scene both by queering it and by straightening it out. He is a passive observer who decides not to interrupt the scene by repeating the gesture just made but thinks he may do so on a larger scale, imagining himself standing up and tapping the Autodidact on the shoulder.32 But he cannot; he is transfixed; voyeuristically, he wants the scene to happen as he remains the heterosexual viewer of an act of male homosexuality. In not acting and in staying as transfixed as the two adolescents, Roquentin is both miming their position and acting in ‘‘bad faith’’: he abandons himself just as the hand will soon be abandoned, just as the hand is abandoned in the first example of bad faith in L’Eˆtre et le ne´ant. Body parts are seriously reduced in number and there is nothing left but hands, lips, and eyes. The same hand that earlier pinched the friend’s arm, thereby confirming the homosocial yet heterosexual masculinity of the boys, now lies upturned on the table like an open vulva; as Serge Doubrovsky correctly notes, the hand is ‘‘feminized.’’33 Specifically, it is feminized both in its vulnerability and in the way Roquentin constructs his description of it: ‘‘Now it was on its back, relaxed, sweet, sensual; it had the carefree nudity of a woman swimmer basking in the sun.’’34 Perhaps unwittingly, the young man lets his hand lie in a position that creates a hollow. In any case, Roquentin specifically chooses words that relate to feminine sensuality and sexuality, through which he radically straightens out the situation. With the image of a nude sunbather, Roquentin insists on the immediate penetrability and vulnerability of the hand, a penetration that starts in the next sentence and that becomes caught up in a dialectic of sex second to none in the book: ‘‘A brown, hairy object approached it hesitatingly. It was a fat finger yellowed by tobacco; near that hand, it had all the disgrace of a male member. It stopped a moment, rigid, pointing to that fragile palm, then suddenly, timidly started to caress it.’’35 Fulfillment of the initial handshake in which the Autodidact’s hand becomes a phallic worm, his finger, arguably even more phallic, assumes its role as a disgraceful penis penetrating the nude female sunbather; caressing the teenager’s hand and masturbating it transforms the hand into a vulva. The phallic reference comes as no surprise, but what is astonishing is the qualification of ‘‘disgrace,’’ which seems to suggest that there is something

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inherently unpleasant or revolting about the penis. Though we know that homosexuality has to be seen to exist in the Sartrean universe, Roquentin does not want to see it and, specifically, he does not want to see another penis. In addition to his misogyny, we must add an etymological misanthropy or, to coin a term, a misophally, rather than out and out homophobia. Moreover, the text here hovers between a straight and a queer reading; the adolescent’s hand is alternately a vagina and a male anus, the finger penetrating it and entering the hollow in which sexuality indecisively hovers. The teenager is man and woman, boy and man, boy and woman, girl and man. Sartre’s text wavers in a repeated and undecidable polymorphous sexual perversity, in which the only unchallenged sexual position is that one practiced by Roquentin, the act of burying his penis in a woman’s vagina, so that the male organ disappears as well. The perversity of the moment is that it erases sex while miming it. Sartre does to the adolescent what he will repeat in the first case of bad faith in L’Eˆtre et le ne´ant: he renders the hand inert.36 But the ‘‘inert flesh’’ in this scene is not produced by the bad faith that Sartre ascribes to the woman whose hand is being caressed by the man. Rather, it is a question of an adolescent who is, as Roquentin notes, afraid and ‘‘overcome’’ (de´passe´) by what is happening to him.37 So his hand lies there on the table, victimized and frozen at the same time, his inertia followed by a silent scream by his friend,38 as if he too were interdit by the act, as if he too were being penetrated by this phallic finger. Even more telling in the perversion of the scene is the disappearance of the Autodidact’s other hand, a disappearance that mimes the disappearance on the previous page of the teenager’s hand to pinch his friend’s arm. This time, it is for a far less jocular though certainly just as common event, for now there is no room for doubt: ‘‘But he had closed his eyelids; he was smiling. His other hand disappeared under the table.’’39 As if in a trance, the Autodidact can be assumed to be masturbating or at least touching himself, just as he is caressing the hand/vulva/anus of the other. No longer is this an innocent gesture, if ever it was; it is rather what is called an attentat a` la pudeur. More importantly, this final sequence of actions—the presumed masturbation plus the silent scream by the friend—brings the whole event out of the sphere of voyeurism, a peep show for Roquentin and the other observers, and into the public sphere in which the Corsican guard intervenes. The fatalistic nature of the event and the transformation of sex and sexuality into an invisible and undecidable polymorphous perversity will have two final effects that concern us here: inversion and infection. From being a hidden act performed only for Roquentin’s eyes, the queer caress becomes visible to all, ostensibly after it is over, through the eyes and language of the

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Corsican guard. But perhaps they all have seen it already, not only the guard and Roquentin, but also the woman next to the latter, who says that she has seen the caress. Were they all then complicitous in this attentat a` la pudeur? Did they not let it happen? At what point does the glancing touch of a hand become an inappropriate caress? As Roquentin describes the scene, the reader knows from the very first that the act is improper. How many times is it necessary for the caress to occur before it is self-evidently ‘‘an incessant coming and going’’ that is an act of masturbation of a queerly sexed hand?40 But Roquentin does not say. And thus, in not moving to end the scandalous action, Roquentin is certainly in bad faith. In letting the guard turn the act into a discourse of homophobia, in permitting homosexuality (as figured in an individual) to become the pour autrui figure that homophobia makes of homosexuality, Roquentin fails to stop the explosion of the private and the exposure of the privates. Homosexuality inverts therefore into the phantasmatic other created by those agencies and agents that want to discipline and punish it. Made public, homosexuality is always reprehensible. But made public, homosexuality also is infectious. Everyone sees it, is complicitous with it, and is fascinated by it as all watch the performance of a probing phallus penetrate the young man’s hand turned into an ersatz anus. And yet it goes further. The Autodidact’s penis in his pants, his finger become a phallus, and now his nose once again: this time thanks to the guard’s fist, it becomes a penis as well, ‘‘pissing blood’’ (pisser le sang).41 There are two points here. First, it is tempting to think that Sartre recalls the Autodidact’s learning process here, thanks to the second reference to his nose. Ironically turned inward and receiving the logos of the other, the Autodidact, that monument to phallogocentrism, is inverted in his learning just as he is inverted in his sexuality. Second, this expression, ‘‘pisser le sang,’’ is figurative, but the figurative depends on the literal. The physical incarnation of homophobia, gay-bashing avant la lettre, is the means by which the gay phallus reproduces. The Autodidact has sprouted a third phallus, as he rapidly moves toward being the ‘‘octopus of inversion.’’ His homosexuality is generalized all over his body, visible in the library that has turned into a panopticon. The discourses of what I am calling homophobia have always generalized the gay sex act to be the only defining moment of a gay person’s life: gay people do not eat, drink, work, or sleep; they actively penetrate other men, or worse, they get anally penetrated. Homosexuality is generalized, at least to Roquentin, or is spread infectiously through the discourse of homophobia. Just as Roquentin is set to revisit the guard’s action on him, Roquentin, in finally rising to action, is

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pegged as a homosexual by the guard.42 Name-calling and insult aside, the octopus has seemingly spread its tentacles. Homosexuality is infectious, turning nice heterosexuals into nasty queers. If, in the biblical account of the Exodus, the Jews were saved by marking their doors with blood, homosexuality stains the door and marks those behind it for damnation in a huis clos from which there will never be any escape: ‘‘The setting sun lit his back for a moment; then he disappeared. On the threshold of the door, there was a spot of blood, in the shape of a star.’’43 And with the gates to hell closed, Sartre ends his exploration of autoeroticism and homosexuality in La Nause´e.

Body Parts When it comes to inscriptions of the body, readings of Sartre have often focused on the oeuvre as a whole to develop an existential notion of the body. As Sartre begins to develop his existentialism, fundamental to which is the distinct dichotomy produced by a phenomenology of surface, an alienation appears at the heart of existence that will translate into the difference between the pour soi and the pour autrui.44 Such an alienation can be seen in the story ‘‘Le Mur,’’ in the collection of the same name, in which the young prisoner, Juan, fearful and prematurely aging, loses contact with his own corporeal identity: ‘‘Three days earlier, he was a rather weak kid; might be pleasing to some; but now he looked like an old queen.’’45 Sartre’s negative characterization of Juan by means of a deprecatory word for a homosexual comes with no surprise; Sartre often cathects negativity on his gay characters or figures, as has been seen above; he will have recourse to it again in later works, including the studies of Genet and Flaubert, among others. Starting with La Nause´e, in which both Roquentin and the Autodidact are alienated, albeit in different ways, and continuing with the examples of bad faith, especially the first, in L’Eˆtre et le ne´ant,46 Sartre’s condition of and for the body is one in which the subject cannot see himself (or more rarely, herself ) from within his or her own subjectivity as anything other than a nonhuman thing or an object. The finger, the hand, or the face is there, dissociated from any recuperative subjectivity that would reintegrate the vision of the body into a conjoined, nonalienated vision of self. As Alain Buisine puts it so well, ‘‘Sartre is the one who never in his life met up with his own reflection.47 Throughout, Sartre takes a position quite different from what we could quickly call, albeit long before the fact, a Merleau-Pontian

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phenomenology that reintegrates the perception of the self into a complete vision;48 Sartre’s vision is ultimately a blind one that perpetuates alienation and contributes to bad faith. Not coincidentally, starting with Roquentin as grounded in the body of a heterosexual man, the Sartrean vision of the body is most often focused on ‘‘lesser’’ individuals according to his rather heteronormative scale: homosexuals and women. There is an inherent tension in Sartre’s work between, on the one hand, his arguments for freedom and his arguments in favor of the free ‘‘expression’’ of homosexuality and, on the other, what seems to be an implicit phallocentrism, misogyny, and heteronormativity that run throughout his work. This tension plays out in many of the early works, but continues through the trilogy, and strong traces remain after that in both Saint Genet and L’Idiot de la famille. So does Juan, in the macho, war-driven world of ‘‘Le Mur’’ start to look like a ‘‘vieille tapette’’: the decomposing body rapidly falls away from healthy heteronormativity into a position of aging and queerness. So does Sartre eventually focus on the body of the homosexual character Daniel in Les Chemins de la liberte´, but more importantly and more centrally, he constructs Genet’s body as that of the pederast, perfect in his imperfection and bad faith in Saint Genet, as he fixates on the centrality of the male anus, necessary to see and to be penetrated to Sartre’s perversion—or ‘‘pervision’’—of male queerness. Again, in the first example of bad faith in L’Eˆtre et le ne´ant, in which the woman abandons her hand on the cafe´ table, we are looking at a lesser vision and a lesser body;49 Sartre objectifies the woman as woman, as the focalization of desire leads him essentially to denormalize her. Again, in Huis-Clos, the woman is either Ine`s or Estelle, a less than comfortable choice in either case between a self-hating lesbian and a child-killer. Sartre’s vision of the body is literally and etymologically a decadent one with only the male heterosexual, as the possessor of desire, ever occupying the safe position. It is nothing short of ironic that Simone de Beauvoir turns the tables in La Ce´re´monie des adieux,50 as she describes the incontinent, aging, and frail Jean-Paul Sartre, in a style Alain Buisine describes as ‘‘without the least restraint and with a falsely innocent shamelessness.’’51 In Le Mur in general, and in each of the stories in particular, Sartre attempts to work out technical literary matters relating to narration and voice, but he also uses the stories as laboratories for addressing issues relative to political, ethical, and social strategies, and therein lies the contradiction. In the often neglected story ‘‘Intimite´,’’ he explores the body as something that plays a role in, if not as something that is constitutive of, his conception of

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gender as well as his rejection of the feminine and his disparagement of the feminine view of the masculine.52 As Michel Rybalka points out in his presentation of the story, one can draw a line from this story to some of the developments on ‘‘feminine bad faith’’ in L’Eˆtre et le ne´ant.53 But that genealogy or filiation is necessarily retrospective: one must look back from the philosophical volume to see certain figures of bad faith already potentially present in ‘‘Intimite´.’’ For lack of a better word, the story is far more perverse than the vision of bad faith described more systematically in L’Eˆtre et le ne´ant, from which only the straight man of action armed with Gidean disponibilite´, Sartre often seems to be saying, is capable of escaping. In ‘‘Intimite´,’’ however, Sartre explores various possible pathways, some of which he will reject and some of which he will retain in L’Eˆtre et le ne´ant. Here he constructs a position that is the opposite of phallocentric male presence, in a centrifugal movement away from female autoeroticism, with the intimations of a telos: the forward looking possibility of constructing existence, order, action, and engagement, based on nothing. And for Sartre, the feminine is precisely that gap of nothingness. The story relies to a great extent on discours indirect libre in order to present the point of view of Lulu, the protagonist, who has taken a lover, Pierre, and who is no longer in love with her impotent husband, Henri, if she ever was. In the first several pages, Sartre insists heavily on the embodiment of sensuality in Lulu and its veritable absence in Henri. Lulu’s body is present as a tool for her to produce her own pleasure; from the very beginning there is an air of autoeroticism that will eventually be fulfilled in the descriptions to come. The tone is set from the very first inscription of the body: ‘‘Lulu slept entirely in the nude, because she loved to caress herself with the sheets and cleaning them cost dearly. Henri had protested in the beginning: one doesn’t sleep completely nude; it’s not done; it’s dirty.’’54 For Henri, his wife is in violation of the principles of appropriate behavior, yet for Lulu, this does not obtain, and she gets pleasure both from the act of violating ‘‘good behavior’’ and from the physical sensuality of having the sheets touch her naked skin. Here, Sartre is already creating the breaches in discourse he needs for Lulu to come into existence in that mise-en-place of the empty place-holder that the feminine is for him. Lulu is drawn into an autoerotic world of her own creation, one that is rather bovaryesque to boot. Singularly, in her misidentification, Lulu assumes the standard position that Sartre will usually assign to male characters, that is to say, she penetrates: ‘‘Lulu was lying on her back; she had put the big toe of her left foot in a tear [fente] in the sheet; it was not a tear but an open

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seam.’’55 As Morris tellingly remarks, ‘‘Lulu assumes the masculine herorole, jutting out clear and free.’’56 It is not merely the sexual connotation ascribed to the word ‘‘fente,’’ a term used as a disparaging synonym for ‘‘vagina’’; it is also that in the two descriptions just quoted, there is a sense of imbalance: the clause implicating self-pleasure and sensuality is countered with a rejection or at least a disparagement of ‘‘women’s work’’: laundering sheets or sewing up something is less interesting to her than furthering her own sensual pleasure. And yet this is an imaginary, impossible world built on solipsistic bad faith. Lulu’s autoeroticism is doubly inspired: an embodiment of her own sensuality focusing on her body as a source of pleasure will be coupled with a complicated rejection of various forms of masculinity, and specifically, various forms of the male body and a fundamental dislike of erections and seminal fluid. But we are not there yet, and it behooves us to look at the continued inscription of her autoeroticism for itself: ‘‘So I stretched out on my back and thought of priests, of pure things, of women, and I first caressed my belly, my beautiful flat belly; I lowered my hands, moved them down, and it was pleasure; as for pleasure, I am the only one who knows how to please me.’’57 In the first instance, pleasure is thus something that comes from oneself and is given to oneself. Rather than being alienated from herself in the way many Sartrean characters will be, Lulu is a MerleauPontian figure avant la lettre, returning to herself and turning back into herself, as her embodied mind and her minded body coalesce into one. It will be the other who inspires alienation, the body of the other and his or her objectification, whether it is his or her body as such or the look of the other that reduces the self to a forced objectification: ‘‘Hell is other people’’ (L’enfer, c’est les autres). First, there is the body of the other woman, in this case Lulu’s friend Rirette. Even if Lulu likes the body of the feminine other, there is nevertheless a process of displacement and distortion that contrasts with her own construction of herself: ‘‘[Rirette] raised her hand; I saw her armpit; I always like her better when her arms are bare. Her armpit. It was gaping. It looked like a mouth. And Lulu saw some wrinkled mauve flesh under the curly wisps that resembled hair.’’58 Rirette is herself only when Lulu makes her different from herself, when her body parts are reassigned, and when Lulu structures her as a monster. In part, this is yet another substitute for the ‘‘fente,’’ the description working as well for what is said as it does precisely for what is not said: the armpit is like a vagina, the new mouth recalling the labia and the hair under her arms serving as a metonym of pubic hair.59

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Displacement and disfigurement, corporeal versions of the metonymy and metaphor of structuralism or Freudian displacement and condensation, turn the woman as other into the symbolic equivalent of the vagina dentata, the fearsome, castrating, and phantasmatic figure posited within a more standard discourse as being anathema to men. Even in his reversal of polarities to upheave deeply rooted essence and replace it with negativity, Sartre does not fully unlock the textual and sexual unconscious of men; he does not abandon a fundamental and foundational misogyny that remains in contradiction with the telos of articulating freedom. The displacement and the distortion are reciprocal, and Sartre seems to care little whether the affect of the distortion is positive or negative. If Lulu likes Rirette’s body or part of her body, the like is not reciprocated, but the distortion is essentially the same: ‘‘ ‘It is true that [Lulu] has an obscene body . . .’ Each time Rirette saw Lulu from in front or behind, she was struck by the obscenity of her body parts, but she didn’t tell herself why; it was an impression.’’60 If Lulu’s body is a source of pleasure to herself and a place for Pierre to pleasure himself, it is a source of obscenity for Rirette, not because Lulu is having sex, but because it is obscene in and of itself. Its forms may be suggestive, but it is as an object pour autrui that its obscenity resides: ‘‘Lulu turned around and they smiled at one another. Rirette thought of the indiscreet body of her friend, with a mixture of disapproval and languor: little perky breasts, smooth skin, all yellow—when you touched it you would have sworn it was rubber—long thighs, a long roguish body, with long limbs.’’61 Bodies are deformed by the look of the other, dehumanized from the nonalienated self-sufficiency of contemplation of one’s navel, autoeroticism, and masturbation; at the same time, bodies are deformed by Sartre’s refusal to put his fantasy construction of women into question. The look of the other exchanges body parts; it displaces them and changes flesh into a nonhuman, rubber-like, inert object. Again, Sartre is paving the way for his concept of alienation by the other, the flesh become a hand in L’Eˆtre et le ne´ant, but he is not yet following the alienation from the self he has limned in La Nause´e. The alienation of the self from the self is, in ‘‘Intimite´,’’ a mediated position: ‘‘He was looking at my breasts and I would have liked them to shrivel on my chest, to annoy him, though there’s not much there—they are very small.’’62 Yet if the alienation of the self from the self is always due to the mediation of the look of the other, it is not completely reciprocal. Lulu’s look sexualizes Rirette and the sheets on her bed, and her mind will desexualize men. Looking at Lulu is a process of desexualization, a reduction of secondary sexual traits to nonsexual ones,

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whether it is her breasts, as above, or her buttocks: ‘‘[Henri] thinks only of getting behind me and I’m sure he touches my behind on purpose, because he knows I am ashamed to death of having one, and when I am ashamed, he gets excited.’’63 A double disembodiment occurs through the eyes of the other: just as her autoeroticism returns her body to her and pulls it away from others, the look of the other alienates and fragments her body, making it both hers and not hers and turning it into something monstrous. Her will to have her secondary sexual characteristics disappear is compounded by the anatomization of the body, as she lists some body parts and even imagines her appendix in a bottle,64 as if in a laboratory, in an early manifestation of what Sartre will ultimately term the visqueux—the viscous—already seen in various scenes in La Nause´e and ultimately to be continued in L’Eˆtre et le ne´ant. The Sartrean viscous is a reminder to what extent subjectivity is a precarious category for him, for subjectivity can always veer off into an objectification that quickly becomes the abjection of the viscous, that to which any relation is complicated, ambiguous, and ultimately monstrous. It is a step beyond alienation and a movement toward dissolving and dissipation, as well as a move away from the standard inherited positions of realist literature and continental philosophy: what sense do mediation and the immediate have if there is no body? There are two possibilities here. One can take a position akin to that of Merleau-Ponty and Sartre’s Lulu, at least relative to herself, wherein mind and body are unalienated, where one’s mind inhabits one’s body. Or one can take a position akin to Sartre’s own and that of many of his characters, in which a post-Cartesian dualism separates the life of the mind from the existence of the body. In either case, the body remains necessary and fundamental, even if only as the whipping boy of the mind. To disperse the body is to invoke the possibility of the viscous and to bring up the shadow of abjection. It is also a means of radically destabilizing the body that goes well beyond the positions of bad faith on which Sartre will found his moral philosophy, that against which engagement and action will happen. To be engaged means to have a body and use it, especially, but not only, in the service of the mind. Yet the position beyond that opposition of engagement and bad faith exists in the abjection of the self: ‘‘I can never fall asleep easily except when it’s my time of month, because then, after all, he will leave me alone, though it seems that there are men who do it with women in that state, and after, they have blood on their belly, blood that is not theirs, and there must be some on the sheets, everywhere, it’s disgusting,

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why do we have to have bodies?’’65 Now this is a complicated move, because it is essentially redoubled. I indicated above that the look of the other is in the alienating glance, but here, it would seem that there is precisely no look: Lulu can sleep peacefully when he is not looking at her or interested in her. But she moves to imagining a scenario in which men have sex with menstruating women and she introjects herself into that position. Thus, having put herself in the position of the menstruating woman, she is both having sex and not having sex, becoming not only the birth in the Augustinian expression, ‘‘we are born between feces and urine’’ (inter faeces et urinem nascimur), but also the menses itself, her body having dissolved into its own evacuation as a rejected liquid. The leitmotif of the viscous, and of crustaceans, ooze, and slime, here translated into a discourse about intestines and menstruation, is not so much Lulu’s direct disgust but rather Sartre’s own, his fundamental foreignness to menstruation in specific and to women’s bodies in general. Lulu’s sexuality, rather than being that of a woman, is a displacement of what Sartre understands: not only the anal penetration by an erect penis that is his life-long obsession, but the autoeroticism that stems from using her toe or her finger as if it too were an erect penis. Is Simone de Beauvoir’s discussion of women’s biology a decade later at least in part a reaction to her companion’s incomprehension when faced with the feminine and female physiology?66 This is a propitious moment to turn toward Sartre’s imaginary, projected sense of what his character would envision for men’s bodies and in which he shows his own obsessions with the body. The figure of the male, even in this story of unalienated presence to the self, is bizarrely distorted into a figure of normalizing phallocentrism. In the case of ‘‘Intimite´,’’ despite the figures of the detumescent or postcoital phallus and its ejaculate, Sartre still needs to posit an erect phallus: Lulu’s problem would be that she does not embrace phallocentrism as the location of presence and the logos. For Lulu, there are two sorts of male bodies, or more precisely, male organs: acceptable, infantilized, and flaccid members and unacceptable, erect, and excited members. If they are central to Sartre’s projected conception of feminine consciousness, they are fundamental to the constellation of the male being. Yet before arriving at the phallocentric moment, there is the pretense that it is precisely nonphallocentric: He neglected the little things; for example, he wasn’t very clean; he didn’t change underwear often enough; when Lulu put them in the hamper, she could not help noticing that they were yellow behind from rubbing his

Sartre’s Bodies 193 crotch. Personally, Lulu didn’t dislike dirtiness: it makes things more intimate; it gives tender shadows, in the hollows of elbows, for example. She didn’t really care for the English, those impersonal bodies that smelled of nothing. But she was horrified by the neglect of her husband, because it was his way of pampering himself.67

Through Lulu’s eyes, Henri becomes a mere child, incapable of controlling his body and given to the same autoeroticism to which she herself is given. But in Henri’s case, because it does not lead to pleasure for her, it is merely a question of dirtiness of which there is the implication of urine or feces and not of ejaculation, through the yellow tinge given to the underwear by his rubbing it. So instead of being a mature adult, Henri becomes a child who cannot control his bodily functions. At the same time, Lulu needs a kind of dirt that neither he nor Englishmen have. What she allows in herself, she does not allow him: he is spoiling himself instead of spoiling her, an act that would be appropriate in Sartre’s world. Through Lulu, the author creates an aporia that can be seen as a foundational moment for bad faith, specifically for the insurmountable diffe´rance of bad faith itself. She likes neither Henri’s dirtiness nor British cleanliness and prefers some sort of desexualized third position that is never spelled out enough and can never be visible enough, for literally and figuratively it creates ‘‘tender shadows.’’ The only dirt that works as dirt is dirt that cannot be seen to be dirt. Hiding in hollows and eclipsed in shadows, dirt is viable—or for that matter, cleanliness is viable—when it cannot be determined and when the act of looking at it cannot function. This nonfunctional gaze founds bad faith as the position of lying to oneself that Sartre will endlessly explore in L’Eˆtre et le ne´ant. This foundation of the negative through negation of vision stands in direct contrast to the will to knowledge, Sartre’s own continuing search to see through, to peer through, and to go past the surface to the depths of the knowable, while never falling into the essentialism central to Western metaphysics. Sartre continues to organize the disposition of Henri’s body through images of infantilization and paralysis and reaffirms the link between impotence and powerlessness, weakness, and incapability. Henri is not structured to be a man, follows a similar path to that of Roquentin, and moves toward unimportance or toward being a ‘‘man without qualities,’’ to use Musil’s apt expression. It little matters that Roquentin thought he had a project and that Henri has none. To the extent that they do not act or engage in a project of construction, they become that other individual, a ‘‘nobody.’’ Roquentin is not infantilized but estranged; yet it is the same as Henri’s

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infantilization at the hands of his wife, in the imagined eyes of his mother. Henri is a cumbersome embarrassment, with neither the sparagmos of Lulu, the teratology of Rirette, or the sexuality of Pierre: Henri is a lump of flesh, incapable of expressing good faith or bad: a child—he will eventually throw a fit—who is not at all a reminder of innocence and purity but rather a sign that we are all somewhat less than the mature adults we all imagine ourselves to be: He had often told Lulu that as soon as he closed his eyes, he felt tied down by tight, resistant ties. He could not even raise his pinky. A big fly caught in a spider web: Lulu loved feeling that big captive body against her. If he could remain paralyzed like that, I would be taking care of him, cleaning him like a baby, and sometimes turning him on his belly and giving him a spanking, and other times, when his mother would come to see him, I’d lay him bare for some reason; I would pull down the sheets and his mother would see him completely naked.68

Fetishized body of the other sacrificed on the Oedipal altar in favor of a ridiculous, abject position: Henri’s body becomes the locus of total incapacity, impotence in all senses of the word, the location of shame, and his own anality. Henri becomes that shamed child worthy of a spanking, who can be humiliated and naked in front of the more powerful, female other. That Sartre chooses such an example is not surprising, for he will always take action in its most phallocentric, male declension: acting is acting to be engaged, yet the political is, in many instances, the collectivization of the singular and sexual. Anything else is nothing short of impotence: ‘‘Reduced to impotence. Lulu smiled: the word ‘impotence’ always made her smile.’’69 In fact, Lulu’s construction of Henri revolves about this incapacity to get hard, as she makes this nontumescent phallus the center of his being.70 Reduction of masculinity to its incapacity, an absence of an erection: this simple way of dealing with intercourse is itself almost childish and is also extended to others who do not copulate. For when she was fifteen, she imagined reaching under priests’ cassocks to fondle their genitals; yet, as they did not use them sexually, she imagined their genitals as innocent, pure, and vegetal: ‘‘a man’s thing, when it’s under a dress, it’s soft; it’s like a big flower.’’71 But the erect phallus is a different matter, with two separate yet related problems: erection in and of itself and the seminal fluid produced. Symbol of all of Sartre’s belief in power, the erect phallus is the organ that moves, rises, and pushes forward. It is the organ of engagement. But none of that is for Lulu, who wants indolence and languishing, no movement, no forward

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thrust. If the erect phallus for the author symbolizes all too easily the higher calling of a man or men to engagement, it is precisely the reverse for his character whom he casts as a stereotyped, closed-minded, and sex-hating woman. And it little matters when she changes from the ironically named ‘‘Henri,’’ whose name comes from the Old German for ‘‘home ruler,’’ to the aptly named, hard as stone ‘‘Pierre,’’ whom she ostensibly loves and with whom she is almost willing to run away; it all remains reprehensible.72 Is there a relation between language and the phallus for Sartre? Is this really Lulu’s rejection, albeit illusory, of a phallogocentric model, a relation of the word and the phallus that Sartre himself would see as central? Arguably, yes: Sartre sets Lulu up as the polar opposite of his own philosophical position; he is working through the possibilities by means of opposition and by means of deciding what to reject. Sartre creates a position in which language has been cleaved from the phallus in a received model of presence and plenitude; in so doing, he rejects that position of silence and separation to return, but at a distance, at one turn of the spiral, to a position linking phallus, presence, and logos. The difference is that he will now predicate that conjoined figure of existence not on plenitude but on nothingness and absurdity. If the phallogocentric position of engagement and action is the only one that is a response to the absurdity of existence, it is constructed as such based on the underlying nothingness. Rather than continue in a line determined by the plenitude of Western metaphysics or retreat into pure Cartesian duality or Merleau-Pontyesque disalienation, Sartre sets out to structure a renewed position for the subject to occupy, and this occurs at the cost of not understanding the feminine. Lulu is the opposite of the author’s own rapidly evolving position, but only insofar as solid flesh and what it can contain are concerned. Thus, he gives her his own figures of the feminine in her distortion of Rirette and especially his own horror at the viscous in the reflection on less than neat bodily organs. It comes as no surprise to see the greatest criticism reserved for man at his most viscous: seminal fluid. No figure inspires more horror in this text: solids can be reversed into nothingness, only to reemerge as existence; the masculine can be inverted into the feminine, only to reemerge ever stronger. Sartre seems to be saying that we can have a phallocentrism based on the construction of the pour soi, over an abyss of nothingness, but nothing can be done about the humid spot of the viscous, the mark of nausea, or the sign of disgust: ‘‘I am not astonished that [Pierre] is pure now; he left his mess here, in the dark. There is a hand-towel full of it and the sheet is moist in the middle of the bed; I cannot extend my legs,

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because I would feel the moisture under my skin, what a mess, and he is all dry.’’73 The spot always marks the other, marks her as ‘‘she who gets splashed.’’ The mark is an indelible reminder of male power and relative female weakness that keeps her in the realm of the liquid and reminds us of how she is marked once a month by liquid. Seminal fluid is the unstoppable reminder of the necessary domination of women by men in Sartre’s mind. The man walks away scot-free; the woman lies there, her skin moist, just as she is moist in her ‘‘belly’’ because she has guts and blood74 and there is nothing to be done about it in this phallocentric world in which women, it would seem, are made to be rendered abject by the ‘‘mess’’ that men leave. If, teleologically and retrospectively, we see the position in ‘‘Intimite´’’ as somewhat akin to that which Merleau-Ponty will eventually develop, a position that Sartre will reject as he works through his concepts of existence in the forties, there would be a period of collaboration between the two philosophers after the war, and Merleau-Ponty would not produce his critique of Sartre, Les Aventures de la dialectique, until 1955. Here, then, Sartre is exploring the ground and paths that will lead him first to L’Eˆtre et le ne´ant and the conceptions of existentialism, and ultimately to the work after the war. In La Nause´e, as has been seen, the nausea is never overcome: if Roquentin abandons his essentialist project on the Marquis de Rollebon, he cannot be said, except for one moment, to have engaged himself existentially in the sense that Sartre will come to develop in his subsequent work. That moment is the defense of the Autodidact, but it is merely a moment. If Roquentin leaves Bouville, it is with no express goal and no project. There has merely been a rejection of essentialism and a turn away from the past. In ‘‘Le Mur,’’ the act of defiance of telling what is believed to be a lie turns ironically into the truth. Here, in ‘‘Intimite´,’’ Sartre uses the body as a vehicle through which he can express a consciousness opposed to the sense of the pour soi he is constructing. By setting up a series of rather simple oppositions, he can express the nothingness that has to be foundational for existence, for as the byword of existentialism would have it: ‘‘existence precedes essence.’’ Having rejected essence in La Nause´e, having produced a fictionalization of facticity in ‘‘E´rostrate,’’ in ‘‘Intimite´,’’ Sartre explores that nothingess to which he is reduced after La Nause´e. In so doing, he is at times hoist with his own petard by the fact that he fails to challenge certain assumptions about the feminine and certain of his own textualized phobias, the most important of which is the fear of the viscous. ‘‘Intimite´’’ is literally and figuratively stained with a spot of seminal fluid that refuses to dry, refuses to go away, a liquid facticity that challenges the freedom of sex in a

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sleazy hotel: ‘‘The hotel clerk laughed when we went upstairs; he is Algerian; I hate those guys; I’m afraid of them. He looked at my legs, after which he went back into the office. He must have told himself, ‘That’s it; they’re doing it,’ and imagined dirty things.’’75 Like the seminal fluid, the liquid laughter and the ideated otherness it engenders are even more powerful means of producing the bad fath that will be the spark and the necessity for the invention of existential freedom in the years to come.

Epilogue

To move from the retrospective and nostalgic view of the Restoration that is Balzac’s to the world leading to the Second World War that is Sartre’s is to cover a bit over a century of tumultuous change, industrial and economic revolution, and social evolution in mores, class structure, and demographics to an extent that the West had never before seen. It is a movement away from a relatively unchanging agrarian society to an urban and industrial one marked by the advent of photography, available electricity, cinema, apartment houses, department stores, urban anonymity, and sexual revolutions. And yet, while there are obvious changes over time in literary narration, the dominant form, even through the experiments of high modernism, is one that, grosso modo, depends on verisimilitude as the principal rhetorical and representational vehicle for reaching its goals. At the same time, if slavishly followed by an author, verisimilitude could turn a work into platitudinous or plodding blow-by-blow narrative, as flat as the depiction of photography as an inconvenient and shallow means of representation for some writers and critics in the middle of the nineteenth century. Realism was intended instead to show depth and meaning and not just surface phenomena. In attempting to reach their goals, authors used various means that involved moves away from or subversions of their own aesthetic that depended on verisimilar representation. Thus, in Le Pe`re Goriot, for example, Balzac presents the denizens of the Maison Vauquer, after which he has a flashback to explain the genesis of the situation in which they find themselves. This move, when combined with ekphrasis, captatio benevolentiae, his use of physiognomy as a semiotic indicator, his presentation of Vautrin, as well as a whole host of other techniques, certainly makes the text more interesting and more readable and gives it the depth the aesthetic requires. In a similar move, Proust offers the reader, first, a scatter-shot approach to Combray, then an ordered one, which he follows with the impossible yet necessary shift in narratorial stance to give the reader the 198

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background for understanding the rest of the Recherche through the flashback of ‘‘Un Amour de Swann.’’ If the nineteenth century is, with the development of the modern city, the century of seismic change, it is also the moment at which, through shifting discourses, the incarnations, discourses, and representations of sexualities (and not just homosexuality) as well as mores in general move toward models that we would recognize as those of modernity. Whether it is Emma Bovary’s desires or the Autodidact’s perverse stances, we see characters’ whose behaviors seem to be those of a world that lasted until quite recently. If, in the wake of the sexual revolutions of the 1960s, and especially in the aftermath of the AIDS epidemic, there have been seismic shifts, these incarnations of sexualities lasted some two centuries. The narratives at hand all contribute to representations of sexualities as integral to senses of identity, much as social and class categorization do. So the class consciousness incarnate in the characters of Zola’s work or even the opposition between province and Paris in Madame Bovary are constructions of the social that move the narratives away from being mere mirrors or surface effects, and toward an in-depth presentation that links representational models, semiotics, signifiers, and signifieds through a kind of pinning down with Lacanian ‘‘points de capiton’’ that anchor (and helps to deconstruct) the processes of representation. While verisimilitude remains the anchor of all of these works, we have seen through analyses of each of them how disruptions strengthen and deepen the narrative while making it more complex as well as, from a subjective point of view, far more interesting. Techniques vary. Balzac’s repertory is perhaps the widest, stretching from the hermeneutics of narrative to the techniques already discussed. Flaubert uses language to undercut the cliche´s (ide´es rec¸ues) of both his characters in particular and the bourgeois mentality in general. Zola uses a particular language and vocabulary in each of his works, ostensibly to make them a record of a specific place, time, and social milieu. Yet, he inserts all sorts of poetic devices through which language undercuts the presentation of reality as if it were a documentary. Taking a more subjective tack in the Recherche, Proust uses the devices of firstperson narration, reversals, and repetitions (analepsis and prolepsis) to weave his cathedral-like text and move it into its monumentality. Colette takes the received knowledge of the nineteenth century about the institutions of gender and sexuality, as well as those of bourgeois society—marriage, for example—and puts them into question in a text that bends gender to put it into

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a new queer light. And Sartre, while remaining steadfast in his male heteronormativity, uses the absurdity of his view of existence to question, at least in an implicit fashion, the metaphysics relative to class, society, and gender. All of these authors, along with many others in the French tradition and elsewhere, transform the possible banality of photographic, surface verisimilitude into a rich patchwork that captures in language the changes, evolutions, and restructurings of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. No one author tells it all. And each of these contributes to our understanding of canonic literature in producing these works. At the same time, there is never the whole story. To understand the transformation of gender in the 1920s, for example, one must read Willy in addition to Colette, Gide, and Proust. To understand urban phenomena, reading Manette Salomon against some of Zola’s Paris novels would be useful. This study, however, has consisted of analyses of canonic works, all of which are necessary to our comprehension of the literature of the time, the dominance of narrative as the genre of modernity, and the simple fact that we think in narrative: whether we like it or not, canonic literature contributes to the ways we think, represent ourselves and others, and engage in social interaction. And while I would not go so far as to say ‘‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi’’ or that I was a chestnut-tree root, these works and others have all contributed to categorizations of the world.

Notes

Introduction 1. See Mortimer, Writing Realism, 2. 2. ‘‘Chercher les causes et les moyens qui donnent les apparences de la re´alite´ aux œuvres d’art.’’ Champfleury, Le Re´alisme, 1. 3. ‘‘Le daguerre´otype n’e´tait pas invente´ au dix-septie`me sie`cle, et cette invention a manque´ aux critiques d’alors, qui n’auraient pas manque´, a` propos de sa de´claration, d’accuser Challes de se servir du daguerre´otype pour rendre sa pense´e. Aujourd’hui l’injure est a` la mode. Qu’un e´crivain e´tudie se´rieusement la nature et s’essaye a` faire entrer le plus de Vrai possible dans une cre´ation, on le compare a` un dague´rre´otypeur.’’ Champfleury, Le Re´alisme, 91. 4. See Samuels, The Spectacular Past. 5. Petrey, Court of the Pear King, 1–36. 6. Mortimer, Writing Realism, 2. 7. Barthes, S/Z, 20. 8. Ibid., 25–27.

1. Balzac: Enallages and Twists 1. On matters relating to prenuptial agreements and the corbeille de marriage, see Susan Hiner’s excellent article ‘‘Marriage Matters.’’ 2. See Lucey, Misfit of the Family. 3. For a brilliant and challenging reading of the relation of the narratee to the ‘‘real’’ reader, see Schuerewegen, Balzac suite et fin. 4. See Lucey, Misfit of the Family. 5. ‘‘Sans songer que l’avarice des pe`res pre´pare la prodigalite´ des enfants, il ne donna presque rien a` son fils, encore que ce fuˆt un fils unique.’’ Balzac, La Come´die humaine, 3:527. 6. ‘‘Laˆche en pense´e, hardi en actions, il conserva longtemps cette candeur secre`te qui rend l’homme la victime et la dupe volontaire de choses contre lesquelles certaines aˆmes he´sitent a` s’insurger, aimant mieux les souffrir que de s’en plaindre.’’ Ibid., 3:528. 7. ‘‘la grande come´die qui pre´ce`de toute vie conjugale.’’ Ibid., 3:551. 8. Ibid., 3:529.

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202 Notes 9. ‘‘Mais il n’avait fait le malheur d’aucune femme, mais il jouait sans perdre, mais il avait du bonheur sans e´clat, mais il avait trop de probite´ pour tromper qui que ce fuˆt, meˆme une fille; mais il ne laissait pas traıˆner ses billets doux.’’ Ibid., 3:530. 10. ‘‘Mais, mon cher, le mariage est une autre allure. Je te vois d’ici, mene´ grand train par Mme la comtesse de Manerville.’’ Ibid., 3:531. 11. As E´ric Bordas points out, Vautrin has a fondness for using ‘‘nous,’’ in the ‘‘nous de majeste´’’ (royal ‘‘we’’), an example of enallage of person in some of the more central volumes of the Come´die humaine (Bordas, Balzac, 77). 12. ‘‘Le mariage, mon gros Paul, est la plus sotte des immolations sociales; nos enfants seuls en profitent et n’en connaissent le prix qu’au moment ou` leurs chevaux paissent les fleurs ne´es sur nos tombes.’’ Balzac, La Come´die humaine, 3:531. For the question of the status of children in several works by Balzac, including this one, see Frappier-Mazur, ‘‘Fortune et filiation.’’ 13. ‘‘Nous seuls sommes exempts du baˆt, et tu vas t’en harnacher? Enfin pourquoi te maries-tu? Tu dois compte de tes raisons a` ton meilleur ami!’’ Balzac, La Come´die humaine, 3:531. 14. ‘‘Marie´, tu deviens ganache, tu calcules les dots, tu parles de morale publique et religieuse, tu trouves les jeunes gens immoraux, dangereux; enfin tu deviendras un acade´micien social.’’ Ibid., 3:532. 15. ‘‘Mais le mariage, Paul, c’est le: Tu n’iras pas plus loin social.’’ Ibid., 3:533. 16. ‘‘puis, a` quarante ans, a` ton premier acce`s de goutte, e´pouse une veuve de trente-six ans: tu pourras eˆtre heureux. Si tu prends une jeune fille pour femme, tu mourras enrage´!’’ Ibid., 3:535. It should be added that ‘‘thirty-six’’ is a magic number in French and thus connotes a whole host of possibilities for Paul. 17. ‘‘Crois-tu donc qu’il en soit du mariage comme de l’amour, et qu’il suffise a` un mari d’eˆtre homme pour eˆtre aime´?’’ Ibid. 18. ‘‘toi qui veux te marier et qui te marieras, as-tu jamais me´dite´ sur le Code civil? . . . Le Code, mon cher, a mis la femme en tutelle, il l’a conside´re´e comme un mineur, comme un enfant. Or, comment gouverne-t-on les enfants? par la crainte.’’ Ibid., 3:536. 19. ‘‘Il e´tait un de ces hommes faits pour recevoir le bonheur plus que pour le donner, qui tiennent beaucoup de la femme, qui veulent eˆtre devine´s, encourage´s, enfin pour lesquels l’amour conjugal doit avoir quelque chose de providentiel.’’ Ibid., 3:537. 20. Ibid. 21. ‘‘Le mariage, se disait-il, n’est de´sagre´able que pour les petites gens; pour les riches, la moitie´ de ses malheurs disparaıˆt.’’ Ibid., 3:546. 22. ‘‘Cre´ole et semblable aux femmes servies par des esclaves, Mme E´vange´lista, qui d’ailleurs appartenait aux Casa-Re´al, illustre famille de la monarchie espagnole, vivait en grande dame, ignorait la valeur de l’argent.’’ Ibid., 3:538. 23. ‘‘ne connaissait rien de l’existence.’’ ‘‘Elle ignorait le prix des choses, elle ne savait comment viennent, s’entretiennent et se conservent les revenus.’’ Ibid., 3:540.

Notes 203 24. ‘‘Comme toutes les jeunes personnes, Natalie avait une figure impe´ne´trable.’’ Ibid., 3:548. 25. ‘‘Ne´anmoins un homme habile a` manier le scalpel de l’analyse euˆt surpris chez Natalie quelque re´ve´lation des difficulte´s que son caracte`re devait offrir quand elle serait aux prises avec la vie conjugale ou sociale.’’ Ibid. 26. ‘‘Mais pour rendre ductile une femme si peu malle´able, ce poignet de fer dont parlait de Marsay a` Paul e´tait ne´cessaire. Le dandy parisien avait raison. La crainte, inspire´e par l’amour, est un instrument infaillible pour marier d’esprit d’une femme.’’ Ibid., 3:550. 27. Se´ginger, ‘‘De ‘La Fleur des pois,’ ’’ 171. 28. ‘‘Dans cette deuxie`me bataille, l’avenir de Paul avait comple`tement change´ de face sans qu’il le suˆt. Des deux eˆtres avec lesquels il se mariait, le plus habile e´tait devenu son ennemi capital et me´ditait de se´parer ses inte´reˆts des siens.’’ Balzac, La Come´die humaine, 3:605. 29. ‘‘la premie`re escarmouche de cette longue et fatigante guerre nomme´e le mariage.’’ Ibid., 3:558. 30. ‘‘Cette veuve devait a` sa fille le tiers de la fortune laisse´e par M. E´vange´lista, douze cent mille francs, et se trouvait hors d’e´tat de s’acquitter, meˆme en se de´pouillant de tous ses biens.’’ Ibid., 3:554. 31. On the majorat, see Perrod, ‘‘Balzac et les ‘majorats.’ ’’ 32. ‘‘nous sommes la fille. . . . Nous nous marions avec nos droits sous le re´gime de la communaute´.’’ Balzac, La Come´die humaine, 3:562. 33. ‘‘Notre dot a` nous, dit Mathias, est la terre de Lanstrac.’’ Ibid., 3:563. 34. ‘‘Voici pourquoi, reprit Solonet. Nous n’avons pas fait inventaire apre`s la mort de notre mari, nous e´tions espagnole, cre´ole, et nous ne connaissions pas les lois franc¸aises.’’ Ibid., 3:563. 35. ‘‘[Mathias]: ‘Est-ce nous qui avons mange´ les millions absents, nous qui ne demandons qu’a` re´soudre des difficulte´s dont nous sommes innocent?’ ‘E´pouseznous et ne chipotez pas,’’ disait Solonet. ‘Chipoter! chipoter! Vous appelez chipoter de´fendre les inte´reˆts des enfants, du pe`re et de la me`re, disait Mathias.’ ‘Oui,’ disait Paul a` sa belle-me`re en continuant.’’ Ibid., 3:571. 36. ‘‘ils vont lui faire baiser les verges avant de lui donner le fouet.’’ Ibid., 3:573. 37. ‘‘ ‘Questa coda non e` di questo gatto (cette queue n’est pas de ce chat),’ s’e´cria Mme E´vange´lista en regardant son parrain Solonet et lui montrant Mathias. ‘Il y a quelque anguille sous roche,’ lui dit a` mi-voix Solonet en re´pondant par un proverbe franc¸ais au proverbe italien.’’ Ibid., 3:579. 38. Ibid., 3:594. 39. ‘‘Opinions et forme, tout y est en dehors des conditions litte´raires. Mais c’est ce que cela fut: un pot-pourri de choses sinistres qui peint notre temps, auquel l’on ne devrait raconter que de semblables histoires, et j’en laisse d’ailleurs la responsabilite´ au narrateur principal.’’ Ibid., 6:331–32. 40. Armine Kotin Mortimer, ‘‘La Maison Nucingen.’’ 41. Schor, Zola’s Crowds. 42. Balzac, La Come´die humaine, 6:332.

204 Notes 43. Ibid., 5:174. 44. The French gives three regional words for speaking with an accent. Godefroid ‘‘ne grasseyait pas, ne gasconnait pas, ne normandisait pas, il parlait purement et correctement.’’ Ibid., 6:341. 45. ‘‘Rastignac tenait alors entre ses mains le fil de toutes ces existences’’; ‘‘Je ne vois, dans toutes ces toupies que tu lances, rien qui ressemble a` l’origine de la fortune de Rastignac.’’ Ibid., 6:369. Balzac uses the same figure of ‘‘je ne vois’’ in Madame de Rochefide’s comment to the narrator in ‘‘Sarrasine,’’ when she cannot ‘‘see’’ the old man (La Zambinella) in the tale told by the narrator. In both cases, I think, the reader is clued in somewhat, whereas the intradiegetic narratee is not. 46. ‘‘Et pour premier acte du de´fi qu’il portait a` la Socie´te´, Rastignac alla dıˆner chez Mme de Nucingen.’’ Ibid., 3:290. 47. ‘‘Cette science fut l’affaire d’un moment; elle fut acquise au sommet du Pe`re-Lachaise, le jour ou` il y conduisait un pauvre honneˆte homme, le pe`re de sa Delphine, mort la dupe de notre socie´te´. . . . Il re´solut de jouer tout ce monde, et de s’y tenir en grand costume de vertu, de probite´, de belles manie`res.’’ Ibid., 6:381. 48. ‘‘ ‘Et Rastignac t’a refuse´?’ dit Blondet a` Finot. ‘Net.’ ‘Mais l’as-tu menace´ des journaux,’ demanda Bixiou. ‘Il s’est mis a` rire,’ re´pondit Finot. ‘Rastignac est l’he´ritier direct de feu de Marsay, il fera son chemin en politique comme dans le monde,’ dit Blondet. ‘Mais comment a-t-il fait sa fortune,’ demanda Couture.’’ Ibid., 6:332. 49. Ibid., 6:383–84. 50. ‘‘Nucingen ne se cache pas pour dire que sa femme est la repre´sentation de sa fortune, une chose indispensable, mais secondaire.’’ Ibid., 6:333. 51. ‘‘Le propre de Nucingen est de faire servir les plus habiles gens de la place a` ses projets, sans les leur communiquer.’’ Ibid., 6:371. 52. Serres, Le Parasite. 53. ‘‘Nucingen laissa donc e´chapper devant du Tillet l’ide´e pyramidale et victorieuse de combiner une entreprise par actions en constituant un capital assez fort pour pouvoir servir de tre`s-gros inte´reˆts aux actionnaires pendant les premiers temps.’’ Ibid., 6:371. 54. Balzac refers to the role of Mississippi (which he misspells) in Law’s system (6:371); specifically, what was to be known as the Mississippi bubble describes a rapid rise and subsequent fall in value of an asset. 55. ‘‘Tout homme supe´rieur doit avoir sur les femmes, les opinions de l’Orient.’’ Ibid., 6:333. 56. ‘‘Le baron a fondu les doctrines orientales et occidentales en une charmante doctrine parisienne.’’ Ibid. 57. It should be noted that Balzac uses the word ‘‘femelle’’ (6:349) to describe Isaure; in French, this word is used almost strictly for animals and almost never for humans. 58. On Balzac’s depiction of women, as well as on questions of the interrelations between the masculine and the feminine in La Come´die humaine, see the excellent work of Catherine Nesci.

Notes 205 59. ‘‘Enfin il re´solut de rapporter ses sentiments, ses ide´es, ses affections a` une femme, une femme! La phamme! ah!’’ Ibid., 6:349. 60. Ibid., 6:341. 61. Ibid., 6:340. 62. For an in-depth examination of these aspects of tale-telling, see Mazet. 63. Amossy and Rosen, ‘‘Du banquet au roman ‘realiste,’ ’’ 154. 64. ‘‘Nous entendıˆmes alors une de ces terribles improvisations . . . elle fut ste´nographie´e par ma me´moire.’’ Balzac, La Come´die humaine, 6:331–32. 65. Ibid., 6:330. 66. ‘‘des petits jeunes gens qui gloussent dans les corridors de l’Ope´ra, comme des poulets en e´pinette.’’ Ibid., 6:349. 67. ‘‘se vit charge´ d’une petite femme beˆte comme une oie, incapable de supporter l’infortune, car au bout de six mois il s’e´tait aperc¸u du changement de l’objet aime´ en volatile.’’ Ibid., 6:390. 68. Ibid., 6:351. 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid. 71. Amossy and Rosen, ‘‘Du banquet au roman ‘realiste,’ ’’ 155. 72. For an excellent reading of this novel, see Bell, ‘‘Effets collate´raux.’’ 73. ‘‘La pantomime, les gestes, en rapport avec les fre´quents changements de voix par lesquels Bixiou peignait les interlocuteurs mis en sce`ne, devaient eˆtre parfaits, car ses trois auditeurs laissaient e´chapper des exclamations approbatives et des interjections de contentement.’’ Balzac, La Come´die humaine, 6:332. 74. Ibid., 6:330. 75. ‘‘un lit d’ailleurs si e´troit qu’il y tenait peu. Une Anglaise, entre´e par hasard chez lui, n’y aurait pu rien trouver d’improper.’’ Ibid., 6:343. 76. ‘‘qui, seul, n’ose pas se croiser les jambes devant son feu, de peur d’eˆtre improper.’’ Ibid. 77. This is not the only instance of Balzac making this obscene pun. As Franc Schuerewegen has reminded me in a personal communication, in ‘‘Les Joyeulsetez du Roy Loys Le Unziesme,’’ one of the Contes droˆlatiques, Balzac writes about an old maid named Godegrand who had never ‘‘found a cover for his pot’’ (Œuvres diverses, 1:98) [trouve´ de couvercle a` son pot]. Beaupertuys suggests to the king that they put a stiff in her bed, as it were: the corpse of a hanged man. 78. ‘‘Blondet, un jour ils ont voulu me faire poser, je leur ai raconte´ une histoire depuis neuf heures du soir jusqu’a` minuit, une aventure a` tiroirs! J’en e´tais a` l’introduction de mon vingt-neuvie`me personnage.’’ Balzac, La Come´die humaine, 6:367. On the roman-feuilleton, see Mortimer, Writing Realism. 79. ‘‘Son tigre e´tait un petit Irlandais, nomme´ Paddy, Joby, Toby (a` volonte´).’’ Balzac, La Come´die humaine, 6:345. 80. Ibid., 6:382. 81. ‘‘Vous vous e´chauffez, vous discutez, vous riez, vous re´pandez votre cœur, votre aˆme, votre esprit dans votre conversation; vous y exprimez des sentiments;

206 Notes vous jouez quand vous eˆtes au jeu, vous causez en causant et vous mangez en mangeant: improper! improper! improper!’’ Ibid., 6:343. 82. Ibid., 6:335. 83. ‘‘le mot ne respecta meˆme point ce que le penseur discute encore.’’ Ibid., 6:331. On the relation between La Maison Nucingen and Diderot, see Dupuis, ‘‘Du Neveu de Rameau.’’ 84. ‘‘ce livre, de´braille´ tout expre`s pour montrer des plaies.’’ Balzac, La Come´die humaine, 6:331. 85. ‘‘l’omnipotence, l’omniscience, l’omniconvenance de l’argent.’’ Ibid., 6:331. 86. ‘‘Ceci est notre nouveau style, des phrases qui filent comme notre macaroni tout a` l’heure.’’ Ibid., 6:349. 87. ‘‘Adieu, Werbrust, en entendant le Dies iræ, je pense trop a` mon pauvre fils.’’ Ibid., 6:357. 88. ‘‘En effet il nous semblait entendre tout le mouvement qui se fait dans une e´glise. Bixiou imitait tout.’’ Ibid., 6:358. 89. Ibid., 6:349. 90. ‘‘l’Art consiste a` baˆtir un palais sur la pointe d’une aiguille.’’ Ibid., 6:363. 91. Ibid., 6:634. 92. ‘‘ ‘Tiens, il y avait du monde a` coˆte´,’ dit Finot en nous entendant sortir. ‘Il y a toujours du monde a` coˆte´,’ re´pondit Bixiou qui devait eˆtre avine´.’’ Ibid., 6:392. 93. Stewart suggests indirectly that Barthes mimics the narrator of ‘‘Sarrasine,’’ as the critic has the ‘‘ability to perpetrate the ellipsis of homoeroticism’’ (Stewart, ‘‘What Barthes Couldn’t Say,’’ 1). 94. Johnson, The Critical Difference, 8. 95. See Nykrog, ‘‘On Seeing and Nothingness.’’ 96. On La Cousine Bette and Le Cousin Pons, see Lucey, Misfit of the Family. 97. On gaps in the narrative of ‘‘Sarrasine,’’ see Kafalenos, Narrative Causalities, 145–46. 98. Knight, ‘‘From Painting to Sculpture,’’ 79. 99. ‘‘Cette myste´rieuse famille avait tout l’attrait d’un poe`me de lord Byron, dont les difficulte´s e´taient traduites d’une manie`re diffe´rente par chaque personne du beau monde; un chant obscur et sublime de strophe en strophe.’’ Balzac, La Come´die humaine, 6:1046. 100. ‘‘Mais, par malheur, l’histoire e´nigmatique de la maison Lanty offrait un perpetuel inte´reˆt de curiosite´ assez semblable a` celui des romans d’Ann Radcliffe.’’ Ibid., 6:1046. 101. Ibid., 6:1047. As Alexandra Wettlaufer notes, the contrast here is also between the figures of Byron and Radcliffe as ‘‘unmistakable harbingers of Romanticism’’ and the paragraph’s ‘‘most unromantic theme,’’ money (Pen vs. Paintbrush, 188). 102. ‘‘personnage e´trange.’’ Balzac, La Come´die humaine, 6:1047. 103. ‘‘un des plus rares caprices de la nature.’’ Ibid., 6:1050.

Notes 207 104. See also Lucey, Misfit of the Family, 272–73. On the interplay between music and sexuality, see also Katherine Kolb’s excellent article ‘‘The Tenor of ‘Sarrasine.’ ’’ 105. Balzac, Le Come´die humaine, 6:1045. 106. He specifically mentions Maria Malibran, Henrietta Sontag, and Jose´phine Fodor-Maineville, all of whom were renowned for their Rossini singing. 107. ‘‘Apprenez un secret: il n’aime pas les femmes.’’ Ibid., 3:192. 108. Johnson remarks: ‘‘Balzac repeatedly castrates his text of the word castration. Far from being the unequivocal answer to the text’s enigma, castration is the way in which the enigma’s answer is withheld. Castration is what the story must, and cannot, say.’’ (The Critical Difference, 11.) See also Stewart, ‘‘What Barthes Couldn’t Say,’’ 8–9. 109. ‘‘trop beau pour un homme.’’ Balzac, La Come´die humaine, 6:1054. 110. ‘‘Je crois, lui dis-je, que cet Adonis repre´sente un . . . un . . . un parent de madame de Lanty.’’ Ibid. 111. ‘‘ ‘Mais,’ me dit madame de Rochefide en m’interrompant, ‘je ne vois encore ni Marianina ni son petit vieillard.’ ‘Vous ne voyez que lui!’ m’e´criai-je, impatiente´ comme un auteur auquel on fait manquer l’effet d’un coup de the´aˆtre.’’ Ibid., 6:1063. 112. ‘‘L’inconnu portait un gilet blanc, brode´ d’or, a` l’ancienne mode, et son linge e´tait d’une blancheur e´clatante. Un jabot de dentelle d’Angleterre assez roux, dont la richesse euˆt e´te´ envie´e par une reine, formait des ruches jaunes sur sa poitrine; mais sur lui cette dentelle e´tait plutoˆt un haillon qu’un ornement.’’ Ibid., 6:1053–54. 113. ‘‘la coquetterie fe´minine de ce personnage fantasmagorique.’’ Ibid. 114. ‘‘L’impie´te´ grave´e sur cette statue e´tait trop forte pour ne pas attirer un chaˆtiment a` l’artiste.’’ Ibid., 6:1058. 115. ‘‘La Zambinella lui montrait re´unies, bien vivantes et de´licates, ces exquises proportions de la nature fe´minine si ardemment de´sire´es, desquelles un sculpteur est, tout a` la fois, le juge le plus se´ve`re et le plus passionne´.’’ Ibid., 6:1060. 116. ‘‘Gloire, science, avenir, existence, couronnes, tout s’e´croula. ‘Eˆtre aime´ d’elle, ou mourir’, tel fut l’arreˆt que Sarrasine porta sur lui-meˆme.’’ Ibid., 6:1061. It should be noted that ‘‘arreˆt’’ automatically brings to mind ‘‘arreˆt de mort,’’ a death sentence, which it in fact is. 117. ‘‘Elle jeta sur Sarrasine un des coups d’œil e´loquents qui disent souvent beaucoup plus de choses que les femmes ne le veulent. Ce regard fut toute une re´ve´lation. Sarrasine e´tait aime´!’’ Ibid., 6:1063–64. 118. ‘‘La Zambinella, repris-je en souriant, s’e´tait effronte´ment croise´ les jambes, et agitait en badinant celle qui se trouvait dessus.’’ Ibid., 6:1065. 119. ‘‘Sa poitrine, dont une dentelle dissimulait les tre´sors. . . .’’ Ibid., 6:1066. 120. ‘‘Quand Vitagliani de´boucha la premie`re bouteille de vin de Champagne, Sarrasine lut dans les yeux de sa voisine une crainte assez vive de la petite de´tonation produite par le de´gagement du gaz. Le tressaillement involontaire de cette organisation fe´minine fut interpreˆte´ par l’amoureux artiste comme l’indice d’une excessive

208 Notes sensibilite´. Cette faiblesse charma le Franc¸ais. Il entre tant de protection dans l’amour d’un homme.’’ Ibid., 6:1066–67. 121. Ibid., 6:1070. 122. Ibid., 6:1068. 123. ‘‘J’abhorre les hommes encore plus peut-eˆtre que je ne hais les femmes.’’ Ibid., 6:1069. 124. ‘‘Je puis eˆtre un ami de´voue´ pour vous, car j’admire votre force et votre caracte`re.’’ Ibid., 6:1069. 125. Ibid., 6:1069. 126. ‘‘Je n’ai pas de cœur!’’ Ibid., 6:1070. 127. Ibid. 128. ‘‘Cette matine´e s’e´coula trop vite pour l’amoureux sculpteur, mais elle fut remplie par une foule d’incidents qui lui de´voile`rent la coquetterie, la faiblesse, la mignardise de cette aˆme molle et sans e´nergie. C’e´tait la femme avec ses peurs soudaines, ses caprices sans raison, ses troubles instinctifs, ses audaces sans cause, ses bravades et sa de´licieuse finesse de sentiment.’’ Ibid. 129. ‘‘C’est sans doute par e´gard pour les cardinaux, les e´veˆques et les abbe´s qui sont ici, demanda Sarrasine, qu’elle est habille´e en homme . . . et une e´pe´e au coˆte´?’’ Ibid., 6:1072. 130. ‘‘Est-il jamais monte´ de femme sur les the´aˆtres de Rome? Et ne savez-vous pas par quelles cre´atures les roˆles de femme sont remplis dans les E´tats du pape?’’ Ibid. 131. Ibid., 6:1073. 132. ‘‘une affreuse ve´rite´’’ Ibid., 6:1072. 133. Ibid. 134. ‘‘Zambinella jeta des cris perc¸ants. En ce moment trois hommes entre`rent, et soudain le sculpteur tomba perce´ de trois coups de stylet.’’ Ibid., 6:1074.

2. Flaubert and Zola: Challenges to Verisimilitude 1. One other negative voice is Dostoevsky, whose pessimism and proto-existentialist angst are perhaps figured best, as Bakhtin has masterfully shown, in the dialogism and polyphony of his narratives. This variation on the master narrative does not really happen, to my knowledge in French realist texts and even the discours indirect libre used by Flaubert and Zola among others is subjected to the universalizing master discourse. What Dostoevsky’s novels illustrate therefore is a pessimism not unlike Flaubert’s that exists, at least in part, because of the challenge to the master narrative that is essential to the realist project. 2. Flaubert, Correspondence, 2:75. 3. ‘‘Quelquefois, quand je me trouve vide, quand l’expression se refuse, quand apre`s [avoir] griffonne´ de longues pages, je de´couvre n’avoir pas fait une phrase, je tombe sur mon divan et j’y reste he´be´te´ dans un marais inte´rieur d’ennuis.’’ Ibid. 4. ‘‘livre sur rien.’’ Ibid., 2:31. 5. Sartre, L’Idiot de la famille, 1:37. Prendergast relates Flaubert’s insistence on form to radical loss or absence, one figure of which is precisely that figure of death:

Notes 209 ‘‘Flaubert’s insistence on the autonomy and the purity of literary ‘form’ rests, in part at least, on an experience of radical loss or separation’’ (Prendergast, ‘‘Flaubert: Writing,’’ 199). On figures of death in Flaubert, see also Bargues-Rollins, Le Pas de Flaubert. 6. ‘‘De la beˆtise comme substance.’’ Sartre, L’Idiot de la famille, 1:613. 7. Unwin, ‘‘Novembre and the Paradox of the New.’’ 8. ‘‘J’ai savoure´ longuement ma vie perdue; je me suis dit avec joie que ma jeunesse e´tait passe´e, car c’est une joie de sentir le froid vous venir au cœur, et de pouvoir dire, le taˆtant de la main comme un foyer qui fume encore: il ne bruˆle plus.’’ Flaubert, Œuvres de jeunesse, 760. 9. ‘‘l’e´ternelle monotonie de ses [life’s] heures qui coulent et de ses jours qui reviennent.’’ Ibid., 774. 10. ‘‘Que faire ici-bas? qu’y reˆver? qu’y baˆtir? dites-le-moi donc, vous que la vie amuse, qui marchez vers un but et vous tourmentez pour quelque chose!’’ Ibid. 11. ‘‘Le he´ros de ce livre, un matin d’octobre, arriva a` Paris avec un cœur de dix-huit ans et un diploˆme de bachelier e`s lettres.’’ Ibid., 835. 12. ‘‘Il pensait aussi a` ces trois jeunes gens, ses plus vieux camarades, ceux avec qui autrefois il avait joue´ au gendarme et au voleur: l’un s’e´tait fait marin, le second. E´tait mort en Afrique, le troisie`me s’e´tait de´ja` marie´; tous trois e´taient morts pour lui.’’ Ibid., 839. 13. ‘‘aurait trente ans.’’ Flaubert, Œuvres comple`tes, 1:584) 14. ‘‘Leur passion, longtemps fermente´e, commenc¸ait a` s’aigrir comme les vieux vins.’’ Flaubert, Œuvres de jeunesse, 950. 15. ‘‘Henry preˆtait des livres a` Mme E´milie—des poe´sies, quelques romans. Elle les lisait en cachette, le soir dans son lit, et elle les lui rendait avec mille marques d’ongle aux endroits de´licats.’’ Ibid., 873. 16. ‘‘Les dames ne disaient rien; ou causaient litte´rature, ce qui est la meˆme chose.’’ Ibid., 857. 17. ‘‘Elle l’avait aime´, apre`s tout.’’ Flaubert, Œuvres comple`tes, 1:581. 18. Ricardou, Nouveaux proble`mes. 24–33. 19. Culler, Jonathan. Flaubert, 91–109; Culler speaks of ‘‘orchestration’’ on p. 95. 20. Hill, ‘‘Flaubert and the Rhetoric of Stupidity,’’ 336. 21. This was already in the process of development in the previous works that I have examined here, and it will reach its apogee in the consistent turgidity of the minds of Fre´de´ric and Deslauriers in the final version of L’E´ducation sentimentale and the total beˆtise of the hapless protagonists of Bouvard et Pe´cuchet. 22. Culler, Flaubert, 129. Doueihi calls Fre´de´ric Moreau a ‘‘failed lover’’ and a ‘‘failed author’’ (‘‘Flaubert’s Costumes,’’ 1086), and Gourgouris points to Bouvard and Pe´cuchet’s ‘‘dauntlessness in the face of ignorance, confusion, and failure’’ (Gourgouris, ‘‘Research, Essay, Failure,’’ 349). 23. ‘‘Le soir, en s’en retournant, Charles reprit une a` une les phrases qu’elle avait dites, taˆchant de se les rappeler, d’en comple´ter le sens, afin de se faire la portion d’existence qu’elle avait ve´cue, dans le temps qu’il ne la connaissait pas encore. Mais

210 Notes jamais il ne put la voir en sa pense´e diffe´remment qu’il ne l’avait vue la premie`re fois, ou telle qu’il venait de la quitter tout a` l’heure.’’ Flaubert, Œuvres comple`tes, 1:582. 24. Ibid., 1:593. 25. ‘‘Elle songeait quelquefois que c’e´taient la` pourtant les plus beaux jours de sa vie, la lune de miel, comme on disait.’’ Ibid., 1:588. 26. For an excellent analysis of this false opposition, see Franc Schuerewegen, ‘‘Museum ou Crouteum.’’ 27. It is somewhat of an arbitrary decision on my part to use the term ‘‘bovarysme,’’ for even if it was inspired by the novel, it was used in psychology, not literary criticism. With appropriate nuances, one could find a wealth of other terms, including ‘‘ideology,’’ ‘‘bad faith,’’ and ‘‘alienation.’’ 28. Gaultier, Le Bovarysme 13. 29. Ibid., 57. 30. Ibid., 64. 31. ‘‘Nous e´tions a` l’e´tude, quand le Proviseur entra, suivi d’un nouveau habille´ en bourgeois et d’un garc¸on de classe qui portait un grand pupitre.’’ Flaubert, Œuvres comple`tes, 1:293. 32. ‘‘On commenc¸a la re´citation des lec¸ons. Il les e´couta, de toutes ses oreilles, attentif comme au sermon.’’ Ibid. 33. ‘‘Nous le vıˆmes qui travaillait en conscience, cherchant tous les mots dans le dictionnaire et se donnant beaucoup de mal.’’ Ibid., 1:295. 34. ‘‘La me`re le nourrissait de confitures; son pe`re le laissait courir sans souliers, et, pour faire le philosophe, disait meˆme qu’il pouvait bien aller tout nu, comme les enfants des beˆtes.’’ Ibid., 1:297. 35. ‘‘lui apprit a` lire, et meˆme lui enseigna sur un vieux piano qu’elle avait, a` chanter deux ou trois petites romances.’’ Ibid. 36. ‘‘A douze ans, sa me`re obtint que l’on commenc¸aˆt ses e´tudes. On en chargea le cure´. Mais les lec¸ons e´taient si courtes et si mal suivies, qu’elles ne pouvaient servir a` grand’chose.’’ Ibid., 1:298. 37. ‘‘Le programme des cours, qu’il lut sur l’affiche, lui fit un effet d’e´tourdissement; cours d’anatomie, cours de pathologie, cours de physiologie, cours de pharmacie, cours de chimie, et de botanique, et de clinique, et de the´rapeutique, sans compter l’hygie`ne ni la matie`re me´dicale, tous noms dont il ignorait les e´tymologies et qui e´taient comme autant de portes de sanctuaires pleins d’augustes te´ne´bres.’’ Ibid., 1:299. 38. ‘‘Il ne comprit rien; il avait beau e´couter, il ne saisissait pas.’’ Ibid., 1:299. 39. ‘‘Graˆce a` ces travaux pre´paratoires, il e´choua comple`tement a` son examen d’officier de sante´.’’ Ibid., 1:300. 40. See Prendergast, ‘‘Flaubert: Quotation.’’ 41. ‘‘Charles se remit donc au travail et pre´para sans discontinuer les matie`res de son examen, dont il apprit d’avance toutes les questions par cœur.’’ Flaubert, Œuvres comple`tes, 1:300–301. 42. Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot.

Notes 211 43. ‘‘Les tomes du Dictionnaire des sciences me´dicales, non coupe´s, mais dont la brochure avait souffert dans toutes les ventes successives par ou` ils avaient passe´, garnissaient presque a` eux seuls les six rayons d’une bibliothe`que en bois de sapin.’’ Flaubert, Œuvres comple`tes, 1:320. 44. ‘‘Elle se plaignait d’e´prouver, depuis le commencement de la saison, des e´tourdissements; elle demanda si les bains de mer lui seraient utiles; elle se mit a` causer du couvent, Charles de son colle`ge, les phrases leur vinrent.’’ Ibid., 1:311. 45. On the functions of mimetic desire in the realist novel (in particular), see Rene´ Girard’s classic work, Mensonge romantique et ve´rite´ romanesque. 46. ‘‘Et Emma cherchait a` savoir ce que l’on entendait au juste dans la vie par les mots de fe´licite´, de passion et d’ivresse, qui lui avaient parus si beaux dans les livres.’’ Flaubert, Œuvres comple`tes, 1:322. 47. Gaultier, Le Bovarysme 30. 48. Ibid. 49. ‘‘Elle avait lu Paul et Virginie et elle avait reˆve´ la maisonnette de bambous, le ne`gre Domingo, le chien Fide`le, mais surtout l’amitie´ douce de quelque bon petit fre`re qui va chercher pour vous des fruits rouges dans des grands arbres plus hauts que des clochers, ou qui court pieds nus sur le sable, vous apportant un nid d’oiseau.’’ Flaubert, Œuvres comple`tes, 1:323. 50. On the interrelations of these forms with the literary, see Samuels, The Spectacular Past. 51. ‘‘repre´sentaient l’histoire de Mademoiselle de La Vallie`re.’’ Flaubert, Œuvres comple`tes, 1:323. 52. ‘‘Les explications le´gendaires . . . glorifiaient toutes la religion, les de´licatesses de cœur et les pompes de la Cour.’’ Ibid. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid. 55. ‘‘Elle savait par cœur les chansons galantes du sie`cle passe´, qu’elle chantait a` demi-voix, tout en poussant son aiguille. Elle contait des histoires, vous apprenait des nouvelles, faisait en ville vos commissions, et preˆtait aux grandes, en cachette, quelque roman qu’elle avait toujours dans les poches de son tablier, et dont la bonne demoiselle elle-meˆme avalait de longs chapitres, dans les intervalles de sa besogne.’’ Ibid., 1:324. 56. ‘‘Elle se laissa donc glisser dans les me´andres lamartiniens, e´couta les harpes sur les lacs, tous les chants de cygnes mourants.’’ Ibid., 1:326. 57. ‘‘Un homme, au contraire, ne devait-il pas tout connaıˆtre . . . ? Mais il n’enseignait rien, celui-la`, ne savait rien, ne souhaitait rien.’’ Ibid., 1:328. 58. Ibid., 1:343–44. 59. ‘‘Paris, plus vaste que l’Oce´an, miroitait donc aux yeux d’Emma dans une atmosphe`re vermeille.’’ Ibid., 1:344. 60. ‘‘Alors, les appe´tits de la chair, les convoitises d’argent et les me´lancolies de la passion, tout se confondait dans une meˆme souffrance;—et au lieu d’en de´tourner sa pense´e, elle l’y attachait davantage, s’excitant a` la douleur et en cherchant partout les occasions.’’ Ibid., 1:389.

212 Notes 61. ‘‘Elle voulut apprendre l’italien: elle acheta des dictionnaires, une grammaire, une provision de papier blanc. Elle essaya des lectures se´rieuses, de l’histoire et de la philosophie.’’ Ibid., 1:405. 62. Ibid., 1:406. 63. ‘‘Elle e´tait l’amoureuse de tous les romans, l’he´roı¨ne de tous les drames, le vague elle de tous les volumes de vers.’’ Ibid., 1:533. 64. ‘‘Alors elle se rappela les he´roı¨nes des livres qu’elle avait lus, et la le´gion lyrique de ces femmes adulte`res se mit a` chanter dans sa me´moire avec des voix de sœurs qui la charmaient.’’ Ibid., 1:439–40. 65. Ibid., 1:487. 66. Ibid., 1:450. 67. Ibid., 1:609. 68. ‘‘A partir de ce moment, son existence ne fut plus qu’un assemblage de mensonges, ou` elle enveloppait son amour comme dans des voiles, pour le cacher. C’e´tait un besoin, une manie, un plaisir, au point que, si elle disait avoir passe´, hier, par le coˆte´ droit d’une rue, il fallait croire qu’elle avait pris par le coˆte´ gauche.’’ Ibid., 1:666. 69. ‘‘Adorable beˆtise de l’amour! il ne se coucha que vers deux heures du matin, apre`s avoir e´crit cinq pages enflamme´es a` la dame de son cœur.’’ Flaubert, Œuvres de jeunesse, 882. 70. Flaubert, Œuvres comple`tes, 1:608. 71. ‘‘N’aurait-on pas le droit d’avertir la police, si le libraire persistait quand meˆme dans son me´tier d’empoisonneur?’’ Ibid., 1:617. 72. ‘‘son pupıˆtre tout abıˆme´ de coups de canif et noirci d’encre.’’ Flaubert, Œuvres de jeunesse, 839. 73. ‘‘raˆpe´s par le frottement du bureau.’’ Flaubert, Œuvres comple`tes 2:9. 74. Richard, Litte´rature et sensation, 126–27. 75. ‘‘les foetus du pharmacien, comme des paquets d’amadou blanc, se pourrissent de plus en plus dans leur alcool bourbeux.’’Flaubert, Œuvres comple`tes, 1:599. 76. Ibid., 1:570. 77. Richard, Litte´rature et sensation, 146. 78. Flaubert, Œuvres comple`tes, 1:796. 79. ‘‘[Hamon] avait peint avec du fard les ulce`res de sa figure. Mais la poudre d’or de ses cheveux lui e´tait tombe´e sur les e´paules, ou` elle faisait deux plaques brillantes, et ils paraissaient blanchaˆtres, fins et creˆpus comme de la laine. Des linges, imbibe´s d’un parfum gras qui de´gouttelait sur les dalles, enveloppaient ses mains, et sa maladie sans doute avait conside´rablement augmente´, car ses yeux disparaissaient sous les plis de ses paupie`res. Pour voir, il lui fallait se renverser la teˆte.’’ Ibid., 1:731. 80. Ginsburg, Flaubert Writing, 144–47. 81. Ibid., 159. 82. Van Zuylen, ‘‘From Horror Vacui,’’ 113. 83. ‘‘La Re´volution est, pour les uns, un e´ve´nement satanique. D’autres la proclament une exception sublime. Les vaincus de chaque coˆte´, naturellement, sont des martyrs.’’ Flaubert, Œuvres comple`tes, 2:239.

Notes 213 84. ‘‘Pour la [cette e´poque] juger impartialement, il faudrait avoir lu toutes les histoires, tous les me´moires, tous les journaux et toutes les pie`ces manuscrites, car de la moindre omission une erreur peut de´pendre qui en ame`nera d’autres a` l’infini. Ils y renonce`rent.’’ Ibid., 2:239. 85. ‘‘Et ils se rappele`rent le temps ou` ils e´taient heureux. . . . Rien, maintenant, n’occasionnerait ces heures si douces qui remplissait la distillerie ou la litte´rature. Un abıˆme les en se´parait. Quelque chose d’irre´vocable e´tait venu.’’ Ibid., 2:275. 86. Ibid., 2:311. 87. Serres, Feux et signaux de brume; Segal, Andre´ Gide. 88. ‘‘Les ide´es de Lisa e´taient que tout le monde doit travailler pour manger; que chacun est charge´ de son propre bonheur; qu’on fait le mal en encourageant la paresse; enfin, que, s’il y a des malheureux, c’est tant pis pour les faine´ants.’’ Zola, Les Rougon-Macquart, 1:91. 89. ‘‘soi-meˆme un lit de be´atitude.’’ Ibid. 90. Ibid., 1:194. 91. On the function of tenses and narrative conventions, see Weinrich, Tempus. 92. On the importance of cod fishing in history, see Kurlansky, Cod. 93. ‘‘beaux poisons.’’ Zola, Les Rougon-Macquart, 1:158. 94. ‘‘si belles avec leurs roussissures me´talliques.’’ Ibid., 1:160. 95. ‘‘leurs pattes casse´es, craquaient’’; ‘‘cette colossale nature morte.’’ Ibid., 1:159–60. 96. ‘‘Margolin n’avait meˆme pas essuye´ la planche a` de´couper.’’ Ibid., 1:281. 97. ‘‘au fond de toute cette nourriture.’’ Ibid., 1:281. 98. ‘‘des rougeurs de seins naissants, des e´paules et des hanches dore´es, toute une nudite´ discre`te.’’ Ibid., 1:326. 99. ‘‘des le`vres trop e´troites de chinoise qui souriaient.’’ Ibid. 100. ‘‘Elle avait un air de grande honneˆtete´.’’ Ibid., 1:77. 101. ‘‘Quels gredins que les honneˆtes gens!’’ Ibid., 1:424. 102. ‘‘Sa chair, paisible, avait cette blancheur transparente, cette peau fine et rose´e des personnes qui vivent d’ordinaire dans les graisses et les viandes crues.’’ Ibid., 1:77. 103. ‘‘trop grosse.’’ Ibid., 1:76. 104. Ibid., 1:77. 105. Ibid. 106. Ibid., 1:85. 107. ‘‘Puis, voyant Florent l’e´couter, lorsqu’il lui expliquait quelque plat tre`s complique´, il lui avoua sa vocation, il entra dans un grand restaurant.’’ Ibid., 1:85. 108. ‘‘il revint fatalement aux beˆtes qu’on de´broche, aux jus qui forcent a` se le´cher les doigts.’’ Ibid., 1:85. 109. ‘‘Le matin, au fort du travail, lorsque la jeune fille venait a` la cuisine, leurs mains se rencontraient au milieu des hachis. Elle l’aidait parfois, elle tenait les boyaux de ses doigts potele´s, pendant qu’il les bourrait de viandes et de lardons. Ou bien ils gouˆtaient ensemble la chair crue des saucisses, du bout de la langue, pour

214 Notes voir si elle e´tait convenablement e´pice´e. Elle e´tait de bon conseil, connaissait des recettes du Midi, qu’il expe´rimenta avec succe`s.’’ Ibid., 1:93. 110. ‘‘Pour ne point crever ni nouer les bouts ensemble, il les prenait avec un baˆton, les enroulait, les portait dans la cour, ou` ils devaient se´cher rapidement sur des claies. Le´on l’aidait, soutenait les bouts trop longs.’’ Ibid., 1:152. 111. ‘‘Tous soufflaient comme s’ils venaient de trop manger.’’ Ibid., 1:153. 112. ‘‘les fromages puaient.’’ Ibid., 1:331. 113. ‘‘Et, derrie`re les balances, dans sa boıˆte mince, un ge´rome´ anise´ re´pandait une infection telle, que des mouches e´taient tombe´es autour de la boıˆte, sur le marbre rouge veine´ de gris.’’ Ibid., 1:333. 114. ‘‘cacophonie de souffles infects’’; ‘‘explosion de puanteurs. Cela s’e´pandait, se soutenait, au milieu du vibrement ge´ne´ral, n’ayant plus de parfums distincts, d’une vertige continue de nause´e et d’une force terrible d’asphyxie. Cependant, il semblait que c’e´taient les paroles mauvaises de Mme Lecœur et de Mlle Saget qui puaient si fort.’’ Ibid., 1:340. 115. Bargues-Rollins, ‘‘Le Ventre de Paris,’’ 101. 116. ‘‘un gosier de gendarme.’’ Ibid., 1:193. 117. Ibid., 1:404. 118. ‘‘Cependant, le commissaire lisait les mode`les d’e´criture, d’un air se´rieux. Les ‘tyranniquement,’ les ‘liberticide,’ les ‘anticonstitutionnel,’ les ‘re´volutionnaire,’ lui faisaient froncer les sourcils. Lorsqu’il lut la phrase: ‘Quand l’heure sonnera, le coupable tombera,’ il donna de petites tapes sur les papiers, en disant: ‘C’est tre`s grave, tre`s grave.’ ’’ Ibid., 1:399. 119. On the rise of haute cuisine, see Ferguson, Accounting for Taste. On the rise of the restaurant, see Spang, The Invention of the Restaurant. On regional travel guides, see Schehr, ‘‘Savory Writing,’’ 125. 120. See Newton and Schumacher, ‘‘La Grande Bouffe.’’ 121. Mossman, ‘‘Etchings in the Earth,’’ 31. 122. Albert Sonnenfeld, quoting Zola’s own Le Ventre de Paris, divides eaters into ‘‘maigres’’ and ‘‘gras’’ (‘‘Emile Zola,’’ 600). As a nonliterary example, see Briffault’s Paris a` table. 123. Zola, Les Rougon-Macquart, 3:1311. 124. ‘‘une poigne´e de vermicelle, qu’elle tenait en reserve depuis trois jours.’’ Ibid., 3:1205. Cf. this startling contrast: ‘‘The cook saw only the vol-au-vents blocked behind a bush, besieged, filling the bellies of the three thousand miserable people asking for bread’’ (ibid., 3:1444) [Elle voyait les vol-au-vent bloque´s derrie`re un buisson, assie´ge´s, gonflant les ventres des trois mille mise´rables qui demandaient du pain]. 125. Ibid., 3:1214. 126. Nelson, ‘‘Luka´cs, Zola,’’ 254. 127. For a ‘‘thermodynamic’’ reading of Zola, see Serres, Feux et signaux de brume. 128. ‘‘un cri de famine’’; ‘‘cri de faim.’’ Ibid., 3:1137, 3:1140. 129. For a different reading of the divisions of this world, see David Bell’s excellent analysis of space and power in the novel (‘‘Bifurcations’’). On space, see also Mitterand, ‘‘Le roman et ses ‘territoires.’ ’’

Notes 215 130. One might also see a reference to Marie-Antoinette and her fondness for ‘‘le hameau’’ in the following: ‘‘Ce´cile had the fantasy of drinking a cup of milk upon seeing a little farm at the edge of the road. . . . But Lucie and Jeanne wanted to see the cow milked; they went into the barn, cups in hand (ibid., 3:1434) [Ce´cile avait eu la fantaisie de boire une tasse de lait, en apercevant une petite ferme, qui bordait la route. . . . Mais Lucie et Jeanne voulaient voir traire le lait, on e´tait alle´ dans l’e´table meˆme avec les tasses]. 131. Bell, Models of Power, 43. See also Petrey, Realism and Revolution, 163–201 and Schor, Zola’s Crowds, 74–76. 132. Bellos, ‘‘From the Bowels of the Earth,’’ 37. 133. ‘‘le marc de la veille.’’ Zola, Les Rougon-Macquart, 3:1150. 134. Mitterand, ‘‘Chronotopies romanesques,’’ 98, as well as Mary, ‘‘Le Voreux dans Germinal,’’ Bellos, ‘‘From the Bowels of the Earth,’’ and Brady, Le Bouc e´missaire, 67–68. 135. ‘‘E´tienne ne comprenait bien qu’une chose: le puits avalait des hommes par bouche´es de vingt et de trente.’’ Ibid., 3:1153. 136. ‘‘Pendant une demi-heure, le puits en de´vora de la sorte, d’une gueule plus ou moins gloutonne.’’ Ibid., 3:1154. 137. In ‘‘Boo¨z endormi,’’ Hugo famously writes that ‘‘His grain was neither miserly nor hateful’’ (Sa gerbe n’e´tait avare ni haineuse). 138. One could perhaps characterize the fully pulverized as the results of an anarchist bombing of a mine. It is interesting to note that there is even a linguistic ambiguity in the word ‘‘pulverize,’’ which in English most often refers to the turning of a solid to a powder and in French (pulveriser) refers to the carrying of microscopic particles in a liquid spray, that is, atomizing. 139. ‘‘Ils s’attablaient enfin, le chocolat fumait dans les bols, on ne parla longtemps que de la brioche. Me´lanie et Honorine restaient, donnaient des de´tails sur la cuisson, les regardaient se bourrer, les le`vres grasses, en disant que c’e´tait un plaisir de faire un gaˆteau, quand on voyait les maıˆtres le manger si volontiers.’’ Zola, Les Rougon-Macquart, 3:1200. 140. ‘‘une crouˆte.’’ Ibid., 3:1205. 141. ‘‘Jeanlin avait ramasse´ les miettes des tartines et trempait une soupe.’’ Ibid., 3:1150. 142. ‘‘Et la Maheude continua d’une voix morne, la teˆte immobile, fermant par instants les yeux sous la clarte´ triste de la chandelle. Elle disait le buffet vide, les petits demandant des tartines, le cafe´ meˆme manquant, et l’eau qui donnait des coliques, et les longues journe´es passes a` tromper la faim avec des feuilles de choux bouillies.’’ Ibid., 3:1147–48. 143. ‘‘Il fallait donc crever de faim?’’ Ibid., 3:1136. 144. ‘‘Malgre´ la proprete´, une odeur d’oignon cuit, enferme´e depuis la veille, empoisonnait l’air chaud, cet air alourdi, toujours charge´ d’une aˆcrete´ de houille. Devant le buffet ouvert, Catherine re´fle´chissait. Il ne restait qu’un bout de pain, du fromage blanc en suffisance, mais a` peine une lichette de beurre; et il s’agissait de faire les tartines pour eux quatre. Enfin elle se de´cida, coupa les tranches, en prit

216 Notes une qu’elle couvrit de fromage, en frotta une autre de beurre, puis les colla ensemble: c’e´tait le ‘‘briquet,’’ la double tartine emporte´e chaque matin a` la fosse.’’ Ibid., 3:1149. 145. Ibid., 3:1310. 146. ‘‘Un bruit sifflant de vapeur la fit se tourner. Elle [Catherine] ferma, se haˆta de courir: l’eau bouillait et se re´pandait, e´teignant le feu. Il ne restait plus de cafe´, elle dut se contenter de passer l’eau sur le marc de la veille; puis, elle sucra dans la cafetie`re, avec de la cassonade.’’ Ibid., 3:1150. 147. ‘‘Tous venaient de faire descendre leur soupe d’une grande lampe´e d’eau fraıˆche, la bonne boisson claire des fins de quinzaine.’’ Ibid., 3:1227. 148. See n. 137 above. 149. Zola, Les Rougon-Macquart, 3:1194. 150. ‘‘[La Maheude] avait rabattu les volets, secoue´ le feu, remis du charbon. Son espoir e´tait que le vieux n’euˆt pas englouti toute la soupe. Mais elle trouve le poeˆlon torche´, elle fit cuire une poigne´e de vermicelle, qu’elle tenait en re´serve depuis trois jours. On l’avalerait a` l’eau, sans beurre; il ne devait rien rester de la lichette de la veille; et elle fut surprise de voir que Catherine, en pre´parant les briquets, avait fait le miracle d’en laisser gros comme une noix. Seulement, cette fois, le buffet e´tait bien vide: rien, pas une crouˆte, pas un fond de provision, pas un os a` ronger.’’ Ibid., 3:1205. 151. ‘‘Lorsque Alzire et les enfants furent la`, elle partagea le vermicelle dans trois petites assiettes. Elle, disait-elle, n’avait pas faim. Bien que Catherine euˆt de´ja` passe´ de l’eau sur le marc de la veille, elle en remit une seconde fois et avala deux grandes chopes d’un cafe´ tellement clair qu’il ressemblait a` de l’eau de rouille.’’ Ibid., 3:1205–6. 152. ‘‘Elle, tout en marchant, de´pensait de´ja` les cent sous: d’abord du pain, puis du cafe´; ensuite, un quart de beurre, un boisseau de pommes de terre, pour la soupe du matin et la ratatouille du soir; enfin, peut-eˆtre un peu de fromage de cochon, car le pe`re avait besoin de viande.’’ Ibid., 3:1209. 153. Ibid., 3:1214. 154. ‘‘Nous aurons du pain jusqu’a` samedi, et le plus beau, c’est qu’il m’a preˆte´ cent sous . . . J’ai encore pris chez lui le beurre, le cafe´, la chicore´e, j’allais meˆme prendre la charcuterie et les pommes de terre, quand j’ai vu qu’il grognait . . . Sept sous de fromage de cochon, dix-huit sous de pommes de terre, il me reste trois francs soixante-quinze pour un ragouˆt et un pot-au-feu.’’ Ibid., 3:1231. 155. See Bell, Models of Power. 156. ‘‘Les pommes de terre e´taient cuites, le cafe´ e´paissi d’une bonne moitie´ de chicore´e, passait dans le filtre, avec un bruit chantant de grosses gouttes.’’ Zola, Les Rougon-Macquart, 3:1216. 157. ‘‘E´coute, tu vas aller cueillir une salade de pissenlits pour ce soir.’’ Ibid., 3:1230. 158. ‘‘la bie`re, dont il pouvaient s’emplir, sans autre ennui que de la pisser trop vite, au fur et a` mesure, claire comme de l’eau de roche.’’ Ibid., 3:1264.

Notes 217 159. In chemistry, sublimation has a special meaning: it is a change of state from solid to gas without the substance passing through the liquid state. In specific, the word refers to water: it indicates a change from ice to steam without water becoming liquid water itself. 160. ‘‘Une salade accompagnerait si bien la ratatouille qu’elle laissait mijoter sur le feu, des pommes de terre, des poireaux, de l’oseille, fricasse´s avec de l’oignon frit! La maison entie`re le sentait, l’oignon frit, cette bonne odeur qui rancit vite et qui pe´ne`tre les briques des corons d’un empoisonnement tel qu’on les flaire de loin dans la campagne, a` ce violent fumet de cuisine pauvre.’’ Ibid., 3:1234. 161. ‘‘des trous ou` rien ne vit.’’ Ibid., 3:1360. 162. Elsewhere, relative to his construction of plot and structure in L’Assommoir, I have argued that Zola creates a kind of infernal machine in his writing, one informed by his concepts of naturalism, positivism, and determinism; past a certain point in a number of the novels (and somewhat like the impetus in a classical tragedy), what follows is inexorable. In Zola’s case, as the characters are subject both to external forces and to internal proclivities, the juggernaut of the plot takes the form of a machine that impels the characters and plot toward their unavoidable conclusion (see Schehr, Flaubert). 163. ‘‘Et d’un bout a` l’autre des fac¸ades, c¸a sentait le lapin, un parfum de cuisine riche, qui combattait ce jour-la` l’odeur inve´te´re´e de l’oignon frit.’’ Zola, Les Rougon-Macquart, 3:1260. 164. ‘‘Vous m’excuserez, je voulais vous donner des huıˆtres . . . Le lundi, vous savez qu’il y a un arrivage d’Ostende a` Marchiennes, et j’avais projete´ d’envoyer la cuisinie`re avec la voiture . . . Mais elle a eu peur de recevoir des pierres.’’ Ibid., 3:1309. 165. ‘‘Outre le lapin aux pommes de terre, qu’ils engraissaient dans le carin depuis un mois, les Maheu avaient une soupe grasse et du bœuf. La paie de quinzaine e´tait justement tombe´e la veille. Ils ne se souvenaient pas d’un pareil re´gal. Meˆme a` la dernie`re Sainte-Barbe, cette feˆte des mineurs ou` ils ne font rien de trois jours, le lapin n’avait pas e´te´ si gras ni si tendre. Aussi les dix paires de maˆchoires, depuis la petite Estelle dont les dents commenc¸aient a` pousser, jusqu’au vieux Bonnemort en train de perdre les siennes, travaillaient d’un tel cœur, que les os euxmeˆmes disparaissaient. C’e´tait bon, la viande; mais ils la dige´raient mal, ils en voyaient trop rarement. Tout y passa, il ne resta qu’un morceau de bouilli pour le soir. On ajouterait des tartines, si l’on avait faim.’’ Ibid., 3:1260–61. 166. ‘‘Des lectures mal dige´re´es lui revenaient, des exemples de peuples qui avaient incendie´ leurs villes pour arreˆter l’ennemi. . . . Les hommes se laissaient mourir d’inanition plutoˆt que de manger le pain des tyrans.’’ Ibid., 3:1335. 167. ‘‘Et il se faisait de longs silences, la cohue buvait, s’empiffrait sans un cri, une muette indigestion de bie`re et de pommes de terre frites s’e´largissait, dans la grosse chaleur, que les poeˆles de friture, bouillant en plein air, augmentaient encore.’’ Ibid., 3:1266. 168. ‘‘Les femmes avaient aperc¸u la cuisine, et c’e´tait une tempeˆte d’impre´cations contre le faisan qui roˆtissait, contre les sauces dont l’odeur grasse ravageait leurs estomacs vides. Ah! ces salauds de bourgeois, on leur en collerait du champagne et des truffes, pour se faire peˆter les tripes!’’ Ibid., 3:1439–40.

218 Notes 169. For Jean Borie, Zola plays on the double meaning of mine, as a hole or well and as a bomb (Zola et les mythes, 81). 170. Zola, Les Rougon-Macquart, 3:1417; 3:1420; 3:1423; 3:1425; 3:1427, etc. On this subject, see Sonnenfeld, ‘‘Emile Zola,’’ 600, and Mossman, ‘‘Etchings in the Earth,’’ 31. 171. ‘‘De´ja`, la Mouquette le de´culottait, tirait le pantalon, tandis que la Levaque soulevait les jambes. Et la Bruˆle´, de ses mains se`ches de vieille, e´carta les cuisses nues, empoigna cette virilite´ morte. Elle tenait tout, arrachant, dans un effort qui tendait sa maigre e´chine et faisait craquer ses grands bras. Les peaux molles re´sistaient, elle dut s’y reprendre, elle finit par emporter le lambeau, un paquet de chair velue et sanglante.’’ Zola, Les Rougon-Macquart, 3:1453. 172. Ibid., 3:1452. 173. ‘‘Des gouttes de sang pleuvaient, cette chair lamentable pendait, comme un de´chet de viande a` l’e´tal d’un boucher.’’ Ibid., 3:1453. 174. ‘‘ ‘Qu’ont-elles donc au bout de ce baˆton?’ demanda Ce´cile, qui s’e´tait enhardie jusqu’a` regarder. Lucie et Jeanne de´clare`rent que ce devait eˆtre une peau de lapin. ‘Non, non, murmura Mme Hennebeau, ils auront pille´ la charcuterie, on dirait un de´bris de porc.’ ’’ Ibid., 3:1454.

3. Colette and Proust: Queering Modernism 1. See Ladenson, Proust’s Lesbianism, 54–57. 2. Kristeva, Le Ge´nie feminine, 305–6. 3. Mari McCarty sees the novel as ‘‘conducive to role-playing’’ and says that the ‘‘best role-players are those who choose to play the role of themselves’’ (‘‘The Theatre as Literary Model,’’ 127). 4. Rogers, ‘‘The ‘Counter-Public Sphere’ ’; see also Boustani, L’E´criture-corps chez Colette, 180–97; Cothran, ‘‘The Pure and the Impure’’; Ladenson, ‘‘Colette for export only’’; Huffer, Another Colette, 71–102; and Jouve, Colette, 84–100. 5. Kristeva, Le Ge´nie feminine, 211–16. 6. See Flieger, Colette and the Fantom Subject; Jouve, Colette, 36–51 and 62–69; and Relyea, ‘‘The Symbolic in the Family Factory,’’ 290–94. 7. There is also a genetic explanation here, as the novel was based in part on stories the author had written years earlier. See Joubert, Colette et ‘‘Che´ri,’’ 9–48, for a genetic history of the text. 8. Ducrey, L’Abe´ce´daire de Colette, 40. 9. ‘‘Elle de´signait Che´ri, debout devant la paroi vitre´e et fumant. Il tenait son fume-cigarette entre les dents et rejetait la teˆte en arrie`re pour e´viter la fume´e. Les trois femmes regarde`rent le jeune homme qui, le front renverse´, les cils mi-clos, les pieds joints, et immobile, semblait pourtant une figure aile´e, planante et dormante dans l’air. . . . Le´a ne se trompa point a` l’expression effare´e, vaincue, des yeux de la jeune fille.’’ Colette, Che´ri, 729. 10. As Anne Duhamel Ketchum correctly says, ‘‘if Che´ri had had a father, he would have learned how to ‘become a man.’ . . . Because he did not learn the

Notes 219 patriarchal law, Che´ri cannot survive in a male world; but because of this, he is Che´ri.’’ (‘‘Colette and the Enterprise of Writing,’’ 26.) Che´ri is different, other from the others. Rosasco calls Che´ri a ‘‘wild animal, be he god or devil’’ (Rosasco, ‘‘Che´ri,’’ 9). Understanding this difference is essential to understanding the novel. 11. Joubert, Colette et ‘‘Che´ri,’’ 63. 12. ‘‘Le´a se souvenait de Che´ri enfant, merveille aux longues boucles. Tout petit, il ne s’appelait pas encore Che´ri, mais seulement Fred. Che´ri, tour a` tour oublie´ et adore´, grandit entre les femmes de chambre de´colore´es et les longs valets sardoniques. Bien qu’il euˆt myste´rieusement apporte´, en naissant, l’opulence, on ne vit nulle miss, nulle Fra¨ulein, aupre`s de Che´ri, pre´serve´ a` grands cris de ‘ces goules.’ ’’ Colette, Che´ri, 732. 13. Suzanne Relyea points to the ‘‘ ‘feminized’ quality’’ of the descriptions of Che´ri (‘‘Polymorphic Perversity,’’ 152). Joubert briefly discusses questions of ‘‘femininity’’ and effeminacy in Colette et ‘‘Che´ri,’’ 77–78. 14. ‘‘Che´ri connut donc toutes les joies d’une enfance de´vergonde´e. Il recueillit, ze´zayant encore, les bas racontars de l’office. Il partagea les soupers clandestins de la cuisine. Il eut les bains de lait d’iris dans la baignoire de sa me`re, et les de´barbouillages haˆtifs avec le coin d’une serviette.’’ Colette, Che´ri, 732. 15. ‘‘Vers le meˆme temps, Mme Peloux imposa a` son fils un abbe´ pre´cepteur qu’elle remercia au bout de dix mois ‘parce que, avoua-t-elle, cette robe noire que je voyais partout traıˆner dans la maison, c¸a me faisait comme si j’avais receuilli une parente pauvre, et Dieu sait qu’il n’y a rien de plus attristant qu’une parente pauvre chez soi!’ ’’ Ibid. 16. Black and white have already appeared in the scene in Le´a’s bedroom, something that I will discuss in the next section. Blackness will come back later, in the color of the bathroom chosen by Che´ri, but there, black becomes a color rather than the absence of color and light. See Philbrick for a discussion of domestic space in Che´ri (‘‘Space and Salvation,’’ 253–55). 17. ‘‘A quatorze ans, Che´ri taˆta du colle`ge. Il n’y croyait pas. Il de´fiait toute geoˆle et s’e´chappa. Non seulement Mme Peloux trouva l’e´nergie de l’incarce´rer a` nouveau, mais encore, devant les pleurs et les injures de son fils, elle s’enfuit, les mains sur les oreilles.’’ Colette, Che´ri, 733. 18. ‘‘Marier Che´ri . . . Ce n’est pas possible, ce n’est pas . . . humain . . . Donner une jeune fille a` Che´ri, pourquoi pas jeter une biche aux chiens? Les gens ne savent pas ce que c’est que Che´ri.’’ Ibid., 722. 19. In her excellent study of Gide, Naomi Segal has proposed a model of fluidity and hydraulics to replace the solid and material (male, heterocentric) models for explaining Gidean hermeneutics. Segal explicitly espouses a feminist, matricentric, and nonphallocentric position for explaining the structures of queerness in Gide’s writing. See Andre´ Gide. 20. ‘‘Elle retrouva Che´ri grandi trop vite, creux, les yeux farde´s de cerne, portant des comple`tes d’entraıˆneur et parlant plus gras que jamais. . . . Il cessa tout a` fait de travailler, voulut chevaux, voitures, bijoux, exigea des mensualite´s rondes.’’ Colette, Che´ri, 733.

220 Notes 21. ‘‘Il passa dix-sept ans, en tournant au petit vieux, au rentier tatillon. Toujours beau, mais maigre, le souffle raccourci.’’ Ibid. 22. ‘‘Le´a! Donne-le-moi, ton collier de perles! Tu m’entends, Le´a? Donne-moi ton collier!’’ Ibid., 719. 23. ‘‘Pourquoi ne me le donnerais-tu pas, ton collier? Il me va aussi bien qu’a` toi, et meˆme mieux!’’ Ibid. Mieke Bal sees this sentence as posing the problem of sexual ambiguity (‘‘Inconsciences de Che´ri,’’ 18); I think that we can—and have to—go radically further. Relyea points to his coveting of the pearl necklace as an indication that ‘‘he is neither male nor female, but an androgynous platonic form, a paradigm’’ (‘‘The Symbolic in the Family Factory,’’ 157). 24. ‘‘Devant les rideaux roses traverse´s de soleil, il dansait, tout noir. Comme un gracieux diable sur fond de fournaise. Mais quand il recula vers le lit, il redevint tout blanc, du pyjama de soie aux babouches de daim.’’ Ibid., 719. 25. ‘‘Il se tenait devant un miroir long, applique´ au mur entre les deux feneˆtres, et contemplait son image de tre`s beau et tre`s jeune homme, ni grand ni petit, le cheveu bleute´ comme un plumage de merle. Il ouvrit son veˆtement de nuit sur une poitrine mate et dure, bombe´e en bouclier, et la meˆme e´tincelle rose joua sur ses dents, sur le blanc de ses yeux sombres et sur les perles du collier.’’ Ibid. 26. ‘‘Je suis au-dessus des conventions, moi. Moi je trouve idiot qu’un homme puisse accepter d’une femme une perle en e´pingle, ou deux pour des boutons, et se croie de´shonore´ si elle lui en donne cinquante.’’ Ibid., 720. 27. ‘‘Elle roulait entre ses doigts, comme un rosaire, son collier jete´ sur le lit. Elle le quittait la nuit, a` pre´sent, car Che´ri, amoureux des belles perles et qui les caressait le matin, euˆt remarque´ trop souvent que le cou de Le´a, e´paissi, perdait sa blancheur et montrait, sous la peau, des muscles de´tendus.’’ Ibid., 722. 28. ‘‘Elle se recoucha sur le dos et constata que Che´ri avait jete´, la veille, ses chaussettes sur la chemine´e, son petit calec¸on sur le bonheur-du-jour, sa cravate au cou d’un buste de Le´a. Elle sourit malgre´ elle a` ce chaud de´sordre masculin et referma a` demi ses grands yeux tranquilles, d’un bleu jeune et qui avaient garde´ tous leurs cils chaˆtains.’’ Ibid., 721–22. 29. Ibid., 724. 30. ‘‘Il se laissa glisser sur l’e´paule de Le´a et ferma les yeux. ‘Pas de femmes . . . Chouette . . . Le´a, dis, es-tu un fre`re? Oui? Eh bien, partons, les femmes . . . j’en suis revenu . . . Les femmes . . . je les ai vues.’ ’’ Ibid., 736. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. This is not the only instance of a change of gender operated in the novel. Several pages later, in a description of an old courtesan way beyond her prime, Colette humorously turns her into a castrated male: ‘‘Maybe seventy years old, with the pudginess of a eunuch in a girdle; people had the habit of saying about old Lili that ‘she went beyond the limits,’ without precisely saying what those limits were’’ (ibid., 756) [Peut-eˆtre soixante-dix ans, un embonpoint d’eunuque corsete´—on avait coutume de dire de la vieille Lili qu’‘elle passait les bornes’ sans pre´ciser de quelles bornes il s’agissaient].

Notes 221 33. ‘‘ ‘Tu comprends, ma che`re . . .’ ‘Appelle-moi Madame, ou Le´a. Je ne suis ni ta femme de chambre, ni un copain de ton aˆge.’ ’’ Ibid., 747. 34. Ibid., 761. 35. ‘‘Le´a n’avait . . . rien compris a` Che´ri.’’ Ibid., 743. 36. ‘‘Mme Peloux n’avait pas de´me´nage´ depuis vingt-cinq ans et maintenait en leur place toutes les erreurs successives de son gouˆt saugrenu et the´saurisateur.’’ Ibid., 765. 37. ‘‘de beaux yeux.’’ Ibid., 766. 38. ‘‘Le mauvais temps retardait l’ache`vement d’un hoˆtel neuf, avenue HenriMartin, et aussi les caprices de Che´ri qui voulut une salle de bains noire, un salon chinois, un sous-sol ame´nage´ en piscine et un gymnase.’’ Ibid., 767. 39. ‘‘Il consultait peu sa jeune femme, bien qu’il fıˆt parade, pour elle, de son autorite´ et qu’il prıˆt soin de masquer, a` l’occasion, son incertitude par des ordres brefs. Elle de´couvrit que s’il savait d’instinct jouer avec le couleurs, il me´prisait les belles formes et les caracte´ristiques des styles.’’ Ibid., 768. 40. ‘‘Elle caressait, secre`tement se´duite et re´volte´e, de telles images qui transformaient leur demeure future en une sorte de palais e´quivoque, de temple a` la gloire de Che´ri.’’ Ibid. 41. ‘‘ ‘Toi qui es bachelie`re, est-ce qu’il n’y a pas quelque par un . . . une sentence, qui dit: ‘‘Ne touchez pas au couteau, au poignard’’; au truc, enfin?’ ‘A la hache,’ dit-elle machinalement. ‘C’est c¸a. Eh bien, mon petit, il ne faut pas toucher a` la hache. C’est-a`-dire blesser un homme . . . dans ses faveurs, si j’ose m’exprimer ainsi. Tu m’as blesse´ dans les dons que je te fais . . . Tu m’as blesse´ dans mes faveurs.’ ‘Tu . . . tu parles comme une cocotte!’ be´gaya-t-elle.’’ Ibid., 774–75. 42. ‘‘Pardon, pardon. Je vous e´paterais bien en affirmant qu’au contraire c’est vous qui pensez comme une grue. En fait d’estimation, on ne trompe pas le fils Peloux. Je m’y connais en ‘cocottes,’ comme vous dites. Je m’y connais un peu. Une ‘cocotte,’ c’est une dame qui s’arrange ge´ne´ralement pour recevoir plus qu’elle ne donne.’’ Ibid., 775. 43. ‘‘ ‘Moi,’ dit-elle, ‘j’ai vu en Italie des hommes plus beaux que toi. C ¸ a court les rues. Mes dix-neuf ans valent ceux de la voisine, un joli garc¸on vaut un autre joli garc¸on, va, va, tout peut s’arranger . . . Un mariage, a` pre´sent, c’est une mesure pour rien.’ ’’ Ibid. 44. Ibid., 780. 45. ‘‘Mais Che´ri, tout ensemble circonspect et grise´, ne cessa pas de parler de Le´a. Il dit des choses raisonnables, impre´gne´es d’un bon sens conjugal. Il vanta le mariage, mais en rendant justice aux vertus de Le´a.’’ Ibid., 780. 46. ‘‘En dix minutes, ils furent au Morris. Le bleu ciel et l’ivoire d’une chambre a` coucher, le faux empire d’un petit salon sourirent a` Che´ri comme de vieux amis. Il se baigna, emprunta a` Desmond une chemise de soie trop e´troite, se coucha et, cale´ entre deux gros oreillers mous, sombra dans un bonheur sans reˆves, dans un sommeil noir et e´pais qui le de´fendait de toutes parts . . .’’ Ibid., 782. 47. ‘‘Leve´ a` 8 heures, rase´, chausse´, fe´brile, Che´ri secoua Desmond qui dormait livide, affreux a` voir et gonfle´ dans le sommeil comme un noye´.’’ Ibid., 787.

222 Notes 48. ‘‘Le dormeur s’assit et arreˆta sur son ami le regard de ses yeux couleur d’eau trouble. Il feignit l’abrutissement pour prolonger un examen attentif de Che´ri, Che´ri veˆtu de bleu, pathe´tique et superbe, paˆle sous un velours de poudre habilement essuye´.’’ Ibid. 49. ‘‘Il sifflotait en carrant son reflet dans le miroir oblong, juste a` sa taille comme celui de la chambre de Le´a, entre les deux feneˆtres. Tout a` l’heure, dans l’autre miroir, un cadre d’or lourd sertirait, sur un fond rose ensoleille´, son image nue ou drape´e d’une soierie laˆche, sa fastueuse image de beau jeune homme aime´, heureux, choye´ qui joue avec les colliers et les bagues de sa maıˆtresse.’’ Ibid., 788. 50. Ibid., 815. 51. Ibid., 817. Kristeva sees the novel in part as an encoding of maternal-filial incest based on Colette’s own relations with her stepson. Thus does Le´a become the safe twin of the forbidden mother. (Le Ge´nie fe´minin, 72–79.) In a very different way, Stary sees Che´ri as partly autobiographical, and she finds similarities between Le´a and Colette at forty-seven, but also between Che´ri and the author as a youth (‘‘Memory in Colette’s Che´ri,’’ 120). 52. ‘‘Je vois . . . Je vois que je ne peux pas traiter en homme un eˆtre qui est capable, par veulerie, de mettre le de´sarroi chez deux femmes.’’ Colette, Che´ri, 822. 53. ‘‘une petite e´pouse sauvage.’’ Ibid., 790. 54. Ibid., 789. 55. As Giuseppina Mecchia has reminded me, there are opening instances of intradiegetic narration in both Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le noir and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. In the first, it is the figure of the Parisian traveler who serves as a ‘‘porteparole’’ for the reader but who disappears quickly. In the latter, it is the famous opening line of the novel that indicates the ‘‘we,’’ but this rhetorical ‘‘we,’’ serving as a kind of normative ground or a figure of received bourgeois knowledge against which Flaubert will write, also quickly disappears. In the case of Du coˆte´ de chez Swann, we have already had one hundred and eighty pages of first-person singular narrative before ‘‘Un Amour de Swann.’’ 56. Even though the Recherche is at times a roman a` clef, with Robert de Montesquiou having served as a recognizable model for Charlus, for example, it is not a roman a` clef in the same way that Julia Kristeva’s Les Samouraı¨ or Truman Capote’s Answered Prayers is considered to be, with many recognizable characters, scenes, and events. 57. This is just one of many paradoxes in the Proustian corpus. On the general problematic of paradox in Proust and on conversions from one ‘‘path’’ to another, as well as on compossibility, see Beryl Schlossman’s excellent work in The Orient of Style, 144–222. 58. ‘‘[J] avais appris, au sujet d’un amour que Swann avait eu avant ma naissance, avec cette pre´cision dans les de´tails plus facile a` obtenir quelquefois pour la vie de ` personnes mortes il y a des sie`cles que pour celle de nos meilleurs amis.’’ Proust, A la recherche, 1:184. 59. Ibid., 1:228–30.

Notes 223 60. One could argue for all sorts of plausible ‘‘explanations,’’ such as Oncle Adolphe having told Marcel, or Odette confessing to Marcel, now that he is an adult, or Swann having told the grandfather. But none of those is validated by the text and all of them have to be conjectures to normalize the text, something I am loath to do. 61. ‘‘il n’y a pas de re´ponse.’’ Ibid., 1:31. 62. Ibid., 1:34. 63. ‘‘c’est au coˆte´ de Me´se´glise que je dois de rester seul en exstase a` respirer.’’ Ibid., 1:183. 64. ‘‘tout Combray et ses environs’’; ‘‘sinon des fissures, des failles ve´ritables, du moins ces veinures, ces bigarrures de coloration, qui dans certaines roches, dans certains marbres, re´ve`lent des diffe´rences d’origine, d’aˆge, de ‘formation.’ ’’ Ibid., 1:47, 1:184. 65. ‘‘Pour faire partie du ‘petit noyau,’ du ‘petit groupe,’ du ‘petit clan’ des Verdurin, une condition e´tait suffisante mais elle e´tait ne´cessaire: il fallait adhe´rer a` un Credo.’’ Ibid., 1:185. 66. ‘‘Toute ‘nouvelle recrue’ a` qui les Verdurin ne pouvaient pas persuader que les soire´es des gens qui n’allaient pas chez eux e´taient ennuyeuses comme la pluie, se voyait imme´diatement exclue.’’ Ibid., 1:185. 67. ‘‘l’orthodoxie de la petite e´glise.’’ Ibid., 1:185. 68. ‘‘Certes le ‘petit noyau’ n’avait aucun rapport avec la socie´te´ ou` fre´quentait Swann.’’ Ibid., 1:188. 69. ‘‘[Swann] n’e´tait pas comme tant de gens qui par paresse ou sentiment re´signe´ de l’obligation que cre´e la grandeur sociale de rester attache´ a` un certain rivage, s’abstiennent des plaisirs que la re´alite´ leur pre´sente en dehors de la position mondaine ou` ils vivent cantonne´s jusqu’a` leur mort, se contentant de finir par appeler plaisirs, faute de mieux, une fois qu’ils sont parvenus a` s’y habituer, les divertissements me´diocres ou les supportables ennuis qu’elle renferme.’’ Ibid., 1:189. 70. Genette, Figures III, 115. 71. ‘‘faire catleyas’’; ‘‘l’hymne national de notre amour.’’ 72. ‘‘de ces femmes comme tout le monde a les siennes, diffe´rentes pour chacun, ` la recherche, 1:193. et qui sont l’oppose´ du type que nos sens re´clament.’’ Proust, A 73. Ibid., 1:219. 74. Ibid., 1:192. 75. ‘‘Mais il n’entrait jamais chez elle. Deux fois seulement dans l’apre`s-midi, il e´tait alle´ participer a` cette ope´ration capitale pour elle: ‘prendre le the´.’ ’’ Ibid., 1:216. 76. ‘‘Une seconde visite qu’il lui fit eut plus d’importance peut-eˆtre.’’ Ibid., 1:219. 77. Ibid., 1:220. 78. ‘‘Swann se reprocha d’avoir me´connu le prix d’un eˆtre qui euˆt paru adorable au grand Sandro, et il se fe´licita que le plaisir qu’il avait a` voir Odette trouvaˆt une justification dans sa propre culture esthe´tique. Il se dit qu’en associant la pense´e d’Odette a` ses reˆves de bonheur il ne s’e´tait pas re´signe´ a` un pis-aller aussi imparfait

224 Notes qu’il l’avait cru jusqu’ici, puisqu’elle contentait en lui ses gouˆts d’art les plus raffine´s. Il oubliait qu’Odette n’e´tait pas plus pour cela une femme selon son de´sir, puisque pre´cise´ment son de´sir avait toujours e´te´ oriente´ dans un sens oppose´ a` ses gouˆts esthe´tiques.’’ Ibid., 1:220–21. 79. ‘‘Il plac¸a sur sa table de travail, comme une photographie d’Odette, une reproduction de la fille de Je´thro.’’ Ibid., 1:221. 80. ‘‘ ‘Enfin ces Cambremer ont un nom bien e´tonnant. Il finit juste a` temps, mais il finit mal!,’ dit-elle en riant. ‘Il ne commence pas mieux,’ re´pondit Swann. ‘En effet cette double abre´viation!’ ’’ Ibid., 1:335–36 81. ‘‘Mais Swann et la princesse avaient une meˆme manie`re de juger les petites choses qui avait pour effet—a` moins que ce ne fuˆt pour cause—une grande analogie dans la fac¸on de s’exprimer et jusque dans la prononciation. Cette ressemblance ne frappait pas parce que rien n’e´tait plus diffe´rent que leurs deux voix.’’ Ibid., 1:336. 82. ‘‘les meˆmes phrases, les meˆmes inflexions, le tour de la coterie Guermantes.’’ Ibid., 1:136. 83. Ibid., 1:350. 84. Ibid. 85. Ibid. 86. On the family novel, see Marthe Robert, D’Œdipe a` Moı¨se. 87. Descombes, Proust, 25–27. 88. ‘‘Enfin il faisait nuit dans l’appartement, je me cognais aux meubles de l’anti` la recherche, 4:63. chambre.’’ Proust, A 89. ‘‘Je me remis donc sur mes jambes; je n’avanc¸ais dans la chambre qu’avec une prudence infinie, je me plac¸ais de fac¸on a` ne pas apercevoir la chaise d’Albertine, le pianola sur les pe´dales duquel elle appuyait ses mules d’or, un seul des objets dont elle avait use´ et qui tous, dans le langage particulier que leur avaient enseigne´ mes souvenirs, semblaient vouloir me donner une traduction, une version diffe´rente, m’annoncer une seconde fois la nouvelle de son de´part. Mais sans les regarder, je les voyais.’’ Ibid., 4:13–14. 90. This knowledge is the same one found at the beginning of the Combray section: ‘‘Perhaps the immobility of the things around us is imposed on them by our certainty that they are themselves and not others, by the immobility of our thought when faced with them’’ (ibid., 1:6) [Peut-eˆtre l’immobilite´ des choses autour de nous leur est-elle impose´e par notre certitude que ce sont elles et non pas d’autres, par l’immobilite´ de notre pense´e en face d’elles]. 91. The dislike is mutual and Albertine, making fun of Franc¸oise’s approximate grammar, manages to insult her. Franc¸oise says, ‘‘Faut-il que j’eteinde?’’ And Albertine, ostensibly correcting her, says ‘‘teigne’’ which is not only the correct second syllable for the subjunctive here but also the word for ‘‘taenia’’ (tapeworm), often used figuratively as an insult. 92. ‘‘Mais c’e´tait surtout en moi que j’entendais avec ivresse un son nouveau rendu par le violon inte´rieur.’’ Ibid., 3:535. 93. ‘‘Des portes de communication depuis longtemps condamne´es se rouvraient dans mon cerveau.’’ Ibid.

Notes 225 94. Ibid., 3:540. 95. Ibid., 1:3–9. 96. ‘‘Mort a` jamais? C’e´tait possible.’’ Ibid., 1:43. 97. ‘‘Parfois je me heurtais, dans les rues obscures du sommeil, a` un de ces mauvais reˆves qui ne sont pas bien graves.’’ Ibid., 4:73–74. 98. Dubois, Pour Albertine, 102. 99. See Gray, Postmodern Proust, 88–90. 100. Derrida, ‘‘Le Facteur de la ve´rite´.’’ 101. For an in depth study of Venice in Proust’s life and in the novel, see Collier, Proust and Venice. 102. Two of the most important set pieces are still to come: the scene in Jupien’s brothel and the matine´e of the Princesse de Guermantes. ` la recherche´, 1:382–86. 103. Proust, A 104. Ibid., 4:202. 105. ‘‘a` Venise . . . la vie quotidienne n’e´tait pas moins re´elle qu’a` Combray.’’ Ibid., 4:203. 106. ‘‘Ce fut le tort de tre`s grands artistes, par une re´action bien naturelle contre la Venise factice des mauvais peintres, de s’eˆtre attache´s uniquement a` la Venise, qu’ils trouve`rent plus re´aliste, des humbles campi, des petits rii abandonne´s. C’e´tait elle que j’explorais souvent l’apre`s-midi, si je ne sortais pas avec ma me`re.’’ Ibid., 4:205. 107. ‘‘Oh! c’est inouı¨, me dit ma me`re. E´coute, on ne s’e´tonne plus de rien a` mon aˆge, mais je t’assure qu’il n’y a rien de plus inattendu que la nouvelle que m’annonce cette lettre.’’ Ibid., 4:236. 108. See Descombes, Proust, 166–67. 109. ‘‘C’est la re´compense de la vertu. C’est un mariage a` la fin d’un roman de ` la recherche´, 4:237. Mme Sand.’’ Proust, A 110. ‘‘C’est le prix du vice, c’est un mariage a` la fin d’un roman de Balzac.’’ Ibid. 111. We can assume that the mother’s version of Sand is the safe one, and we know that the gift of novels in Combray includes Franc¸ois-le-Champi and other Grated works. For an excellent and subtle reading of the role of the mother and the articulation of desire, see Mecchia, ‘‘Proustiens, encore un effort . . . !’’ 112. This will become reenacted in greater detail as the brothel to which Bloch has taken Marcel early on is replaced by the other brothel scene, in the homosexual brothel run by Jupien where Marcel espies Charlus being flagellated. ` la recherche´, 4:242. ‘‘Comme ¸ca’’ (like 113. ‘‘tout le contraire de ‘c¸a.’ ’’ Proust, A that) is a euphemism for being gay. 114. Ibid., 4:244. 115. ‘‘Les homosexuels seraient les meilleurs maris du monde s’ils ne jouaient pas la come´die d’aimer les femmes.’’ Ibid., 4:263. 116. Ibid. 117. ‘‘Personnellement je trouvais absolument indiffe´rent au point de vue de la morale qu’on trouvaˆt son plaisir aupre`s d’un homme ou d’une femme, et trop naturel et humain qu’on le cherchaˆt la` ou` on pouvait le trouver. Si donc Robert

226 Notes n’avait pas e´te´ marie´, sa liaison avec Charlie n’euˆt duˆ me faire aucune peine. Et pourtant je sentais bien que celle que j’e´prouvais euˆt e´te´ aussi vive si Robert e´tait reste´ ce´libataire.’’ Ibid., 4:265. 118. ‘‘Mais j’e´tais persuade´ que l’e´volution physiologique de Saint-Loup n’e´tait pas commence´e a` cette e´poque [Balbec] et qu’alors il aimait encore uniquement les femmes.’’ Ibid., 4:262. 119. Ibid., 4:266. 120. ‘‘plusieurs fois elle m’e´tonna beaucoup’’; ‘‘un de mes autres e´tonnements’’; ‘‘Et la troisie`me fois fut quand Gilberte me dit: ‘‘Si vous voulez, nous pourrons tout de meˆme sortir un apre`s-midi et nous pourrons alors aller a` Guermantes, en prenant par Me´se´glise, c’est la plus jolie fac¸on,’’ phrase qui en bouleversant toutes les ide´es de mon enfance m’apprit que les deux coˆte´s n’e´taient pas aussi inconciliables que j’avais cru. Mais ce qui me frappa le plus, ce fut combien peu, pendant ce se´jour, je reve´cus mes anne´es d’autrefois, de´sirai peu revoir Combray, trouvai mince et laide la Vivonne.’’ Ibid., 4:268. 121. ‘‘On dıˆnait maintenant a` Tansonville a` une heure ou` jadis on dormait depuis longtemps a` Combray.’’ Ibid., 4:266. 122. ‘‘C’est comme si elle m’avait dit: ‘Tournez a` gauche, prenez ensuite a` votre main droite, et vous toucherez l’intangible, vous atteindrez les inatteignables loins dont on ne connaıˆt jamais sur terre que la direction.’ ’’ Ibid., 4:269. 123. ‘‘J’eus un sursaut de de´sir et de regret en pensant aux souterrains de Roussainville. Pourtant j’e´tais heureux de me dire que ce bonheur vers lequel se tendaient toutes mes forces alors, et que rien ne pouvait plus me rendre, euˆt existe´ ailleurs que dans ma pense´e, en re´alite´ si pre`s de moi, dans ce Roussainville dont je parlais si souvent, que j’apercevais du cabinet sentant l’iris.’’ Ibid., 4:272.

4. Sartre’s Bodies 1. ‘‘La contingence, la premie`re fois que j’en parlais, c’e´tait dans un carnet que j’avais ramasse´ dans un me´tro. C’e´tait un carnet vierge, il y avait dessus ‘Suppositoires Midy,’ c’e´tait e´videmment un carnet distribue´ aux me´decins. Il e´tait fait comme un registre avec A—B—C—D, etc. et—c’est peut-eˆtre c¸a qui m’a donne´ l’ide´e de faire de l’Autodidacte, un des personnages de La Nause´e, un homme qui s’instruit alphabe´tiquement—je mettais mes pense´es par ordre alphabe´tique, pour une simple raison, c’est qu’il y avait l’ordre alphabe´tique dans ce register.’’ Sartre, 31. 2. Sartre, Œuvres romanesques, 1726. 3. As Kershaw notes, Sartre addresses the question of autodidacticism in an earlier, unfinished work (Kershaw, ‘‘Autodidacticism and Criminality’’). On autodidacticism, see Chapman, ‘‘Autodidacticism and the Desire for Culture’’ as well. 4. Kritzman, ‘‘To Be or Not to Be,’’ 81. 5. On Roquentin’s heteronormativity, see Vanbaelen, ‘‘Anny, Syrinx de Roquentin,’’ 402. In his article, Leak writes of ‘‘the jeopardizing of the masculine attitude, the loss of gender-identity and, ultimately, castration’’ (‘‘Nausea and

Notes 227 Desire,’’ 65). In his excellent volume, Robert Harvey discusses Sartrean ‘‘ontological androgyny or, perhaps, even sexual ‘betweenness’ ’’ as well as what he calls ‘‘the erosion of masculinity’’ (Search for a Father, 110–18). See also Doubrovsky, ‘‘Phallotexte et gynotexte.’’ 6. Taking his title from Terence, Baudelaire includes a poem, ‘‘L’He´autontimoroume´nos’’ in Les Fleurs du mal, in which one reads the following lines that could have been said by the Autodidact: ‘‘Je suis la plaie et le couteau! / Je suis le soufflet et la joue! / Je suis les membres et la roue, / Et la victime et le bourreau.’’ 7. ‘‘Je voyais un visage inconnu, a` peine un visage. Et puis il y avait sa main, comme un gros ver blanc dans ma main.’’ Sartre, Œuvres romanesques, 9. 8. Sartre seems vague about the age of the two young men and whether they have entered puberty or not. Kershaw for one sees the molestation scene as a scene of ‘‘homosexual paedophilia’’ (‘‘Autodidacticism and Criminality’’). I tend, as will be seen from the rest of the article, to consider that the boys have at least begun to enter manhood. 9. ‘‘Il regardait en souriant son voisin de droite, un colle´gien crasseux qui vient souvent a` la Bibliothe`que. L’autre s’est laisse´ contempler un moment, puis lui a brusquement tire´ la langue en faisant un horrible grimace. L’Autodidacte a rougi, il a plonge´ pre´cipitamment le nez dans son livre et s’est absorbe´ dans sa lecture.’’ Sartre, Œuvres romanesques, 48. 10. ‘‘beˆte a` la renverse.’’ Ibid., 118. 11. ‘‘il m’arrive une histoire abominable.’’ Ibid., 91. 12. ‘‘Il rougit et ses hanches ondoye`rent gracieusement.’’ Ibid. 13. ‘‘Il s’assied sur une chaise; ses fesses tendues touchent le dossier et son buste roide s’incline en avant. Je saute en bas de mon lit, je donne de la lumie`re: ‘Mais comment donc, monsieur? Nous e´tions fort bien.’ ’’ Ibid., 42. 14. Kritzman, ‘‘To Be or Not to Be,’’ 79. 15. ‘‘sa grande maˆchoire d’aˆne.’’ Sartre, Œuvres romanesques, 43. See Judges 15:15–16. Samson says he slaughtered the Philistines with the jawbone of an ass. On the body movements of the Autodidact, see Chapman, who remarks that ‘‘his bodily movements and gestures often suggest femininity (‘‘Autodidacticism ,’’ 98). 16. ‘‘s’accouplent au hasard, me`re et fils, pe`re et fille, fre`re et soeur, se mutilent, se chaˆtrent, se distendent les le`vres avec des plateaux, se font sculpter sur les reins des animaux monstrueux.’’ Sartre, Œuvres romanesques, 43–44. 17. ‘‘un de´lire secret.’’ Ibid., 44. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 45. 20. ‘‘Je salue au passage l’humanisme catholique a` qui l’Autodidacte a emprunte´, sans le savoir, cette formule.’’ Ibid., 142–43. 21. ‘‘ ‘Comment pouvez-vous, dit l’Autodidacte, arreˆter un homme, dire il est ceci ou cela? Qui peut e´puiser un homme? Qui peut connaıˆtre les ressources d’un homme?’ ’’ Ibid., 142. 22. I follow Sartre’s use of the word ‘‘man’’ here because the discourse is fundamentally androcentric. In the abstract, one would make the argument about the

228 Notes individual, be it a man or a woman, even if Sartre’s treatment of women in his texts does not always seem totally egalitarian. 23. ‘‘Je contemple l’Autodidacte avec un peu de remords: il s’est complu toute la semaine a` imaginer ce de´jeuner, ou` il pourrait faire part a` un autre homme de son amour des hommes. Il a si rarement l’occasion de parler. Et voila`: je lui ai gaˆche´ son plaisir.’’ Sartre, Œuvres romanesques, 143–44. 24. ‘‘A vrai dire, je n’ai gue`re e´te´ surpris quand la chose est arrive´e: depuis longtemps, je sentais que sa teˆte douce et craintive appelait sur elle le scandale. Il e´tait si peu coupable: c’est a` peine de la sensualite´, son humble amour contemplatif pour les jeunes garcons—une forme d’humanisme, plutoˆt.’’ Ibid., 189. 25. ‘‘Le Journal de Bouville traıˆnait sur la table. J’allongeai la main, je le pris.’’ Ibid., 190. 26. Ibid., 191. 27. ‘‘Pourtant, de`s ce moment, j’eus l’impression qu’un e´ve´nement de´sagre´able allait se produire’’; ‘‘Ce qui augmentait ma curiosite´ et ma geˆne, c’est que les autres attendaient aussi’’; ‘‘Je sentis clairement que le drame allait e´clater: ils voulaient tous qu’il e´clataˆt’’; ‘‘L’Autodidacte n’avait pas l’air surpris. Il devait y avoir des anne´es qu’il s’attendait a` ce de´nouement. Cent fois il avait duˆ imaginer ce qui se passerait.’’ Ibid., 193, 193, 194, 196. 28. ‘‘fixait sur eux un regard fatigue´.’’ Ibid., 193. 29. ‘‘Il e´tait penche´ sur son jeune voisin, les yeux dans les yeux, il lui souriait; je voyais remuer ses le`vres et, de temps en temps, ses longs cils palpitaient. Je ne lui connaissais pas cet air de jeunesse, il e´tait presque charmant. Mais par instants, il s’interrompai et jetait derrie`re lui un regard inquiet. Le jeune garc¸on semblait boire ses paroles.’’ Ibid. 30. ‘‘une ombre de moustache.’’ Ibid. 31. Ibid., 194. 32. Ibid. 33. Doubrovsky, ‘‘Phallotexte et gynotexte,’’ 46. ` pre´sent elle reposait sur le dos, de´tendue, douce et sensuelle, elle avait 34. ‘‘A l’indolente nudite´ d’une baigneuse qui se chauffe au soleil.’’ Sartre, Œuvres romanesques, 195. 35. ‘‘Un objet brun et velu s’en approcha, he´sitant. C’e´tait un gros doigt jauni par le tabac; il avait, pre`s de cette main, toute la disgraˆce d’un sexe maˆle. Il s’arreˆta un instant, rigide, pointant vers la paume fragile, puis, tout d’un coup, timidement, il se mit a` la caresser.’’ Ibid. 36. See Gore, ‘‘Lucienne, Sex, and Nausea,’’ 40. 37. Sartre, Œuvres romanesques, 195. 38. Ibid. 39. ‘‘Mais il avait clos ses paupie`res, il souriait. Son autre main avait disparu sous la table.’’ Ibid. 40. ‘‘ce va-et-vient obstine´.’’ Ibid. 41. Ibid., 197. 42. Ibid., 198.

Notes 229 43. ‘‘Le soleil couchant e´claira un moment son dos courbe´, puis il disparut. Sur le seuil de la porte, il y avait une tache de sang, en e´toile.’’ Ibid., 199. 44. See Sartre, L’Eˆtre et le ne´ant, 368–430; Hollier, Politique de la prose; and Noudelmann, Sartre. 45. ‘‘Trois jours auparavant c’e´tait un moˆme dans le genre mie`vre, c¸a peut plaire; mais maintenant il avait l’air d’une vieille tapette.’’ Sartre, Œuvres romanesques, 217. 46. Ibid., 85–111. 47. Buisine, Laideurs de Sartre, 95. 48. See Merleau-Ponty, L’Œil et l’esprit. 49. Sartre, Œuvres romanesques, 94–98. 50. Beauvoir, La Ce´re´monie des adieux 15–159. 51. Buisine, Laideurs de Sartre, 18. 52. Written in early 1937, ‘‘Intimite´’’ was first published by the N.R.F. in the summer of 1938 and eventually included in Le Mur, with certain passages restored that had been omitted from the original publication. 53. Rybalka, in Sartre, Œuvres romanesques, 1845. 54. ‘‘Lulu couchait nue parce qu’elle aimait se caresser aux draps et que le blanchissage couˆte cher. Henri avait proteste´ au de´but: on ne se met pas toute nue dans un lit, c¸a ne se fait pas, c’est sale.’’ Sartre, Œuvres romanesques, 279. 55. ‘‘Lulu e´tait couche´e sur le dos, elle avait introduit le gros orteil de son pied gauche dans une fente du drap; ce n’e´tait pas une fente, c’e´tait un de´cousu.’’ Ibid., 279–80. 56. Morris, ‘‘Intimacy,’’ 74. See also Noudelmann, Sartre, 51ff. 57. ‘‘Alors je m’e´tendais sur le dos et je pensais a` des cure´s, a` des choses pures, a` des femmes, et je me caressais le ventre d’abord, mon beau ventre plat, je descendais les mains, je descendais, et c’e´tait le plaisir; le plaisir il n’y a que moi qui sache me le donner.’’ Sartre, Œuvres romanesques, 283. 58. ‘‘[Rirette] a leve´ le bras, j’ai vu son aisselle, je l’aime toujours mieux quand elle a les bras nus. L’aisselle. Elle s’entrouvrit, on aurait dit une bouche, et Lulu vit une chair mauve, un peu ride´e, sous des poils frise´s qui ressemblaient a` des cheveux.’’ Ibid. 59. On the mutability (or fungibility) of body parts, see Harvey, Search for a Father, 111. 60. ‘‘ ‘C’est pourtant vrai qu’elle [Lulu] a un corps obscene . . .’ Chaque fois que Rirette voyait Lulu de dos ou de profil, elle e´tait frappe´e par l’obsce´nite´ de ses formes mais elle ne s’expliquait pas pourquoi; c’e´tait une impression.’’ Ibid., 297. 61. ‘‘Lulu se retourna et elles se sourirent. Rirette pensait au corps indiscret de son amie avec un me´lange de re´probation et de langueur: de petits seins retrousse´s, une chair polie, toute jaune—quand on la touchait on aurait jure´ du caoutchouc—de longues cuisses, un long corps canaille, aux membres longs.’’ Ibid. 62. ‘‘il regardait mes seins et j’aurais voulu qu’ils se`chent sur ma poitrine, pour l’embeˆter, pourtant je n’en ai pas beaucoup, ils sont tout petits.’’ Ibid., 285. On hands in Sartre’s work, see Hollier, Politique de la prose, 167–86.

230 Notes 63. ‘‘[Henri] ne pense qu’a` se mettre derrie`re moi et je suis suˆre qu’il fait expre`s de me toucher le derrie`re parce qu’il sait que je meurs de honte d’en avoir un, quand j’ai honte c¸a l’excite.’’ Sartre, Œuvres romanesques, 281–82. 64. Ibid., 281. 65. ‘‘je ne pourrai jamais m’endormir tranquille sauf quand j’aurai mes affaires, parce que la`, tout de meˆme, il me fichera la paix et encore il paraıˆt qu’il y a des hommes qui font cela avec les femmes indispose´es et apre`s ils ont du sang sur le ventre, du sang qui n’est pas a` eux, et il doit y en avoir sur les draps, partout, c’est de´gouˆtant, pourquoi faut-il que nous ayons des corps?’’ Ibid., 285–86. 66. See Beauvoir, Le Deuxie`me Sexe, 1:39–51. 67. ‘‘il se ne´gligeait dans les petites choses, par exemple il n’e´tait pas tre`s propre, il ne changeait pas assez souvent de calec¸ons; quand Lulu les mettait au sale, elle ne pouvait pas s’empeˆcher de remarquer qu’ils avaient le fond jaune a` force de frotter contre l’entrejambe. Personnellement, Lulu ne de´testait pas la salete´: c¸a fait plus intime, c¸a donne des ombres tendres; au creux des coudes par exemple; elle n’aimait gue`re ces Anglais, ces corps impersonnels qui ne sentent rien. Mais elle avait horreur des ne´gligences de son mari, parce que c’e´taient des fac¸ons de se dorloter.’’ Ibid., 279. 68. ‘‘Il l’avait souvent dit a` Lulu: de`s qu’il fermait les yeux, il se sentait ligote´ par des liens te´nus et re´sistants, il ne pouvait meˆme plus lever le petit doigt. Une grosse mouche embobine´e dans une toile d’araigne´e, Lulu aimait sentir contre elle ce grand corps captif. S’il pouvait rester comme c¸a paralyse´, c’est moi qui le soignerais, qui le nettoierais comme un enfant et quelquefois je le retournerais sur le ventre et je lui donnerais la fesse´e et d’autres fois, quand sa me`re viendrait le voir, je le de´couvrirais sous un pre´texte, je rabattrais les draps et sa me`re le verrait tout nu.’’ Ibid., 280. 69. ‘‘Re´duit a` l’impuissance. Lulu sourit: le mot ‘impuissance’ la faisait toujours sourire.’’ Ibid. 70. Ibid., 282–83. 71. ‘‘un machin d’homme, quand c’est sous une robe, c’est douillet, c’est comme une grosse fleur.’’ Ibid., 282. 72. Ibid., 305. 73. ‘‘C ¸ a ne m’e´tonne pas qu’il [Pierre] soit pur en ce moment, il a laisse´ son ordure ici, dans le noir, il y a un essuie-main qui en est rempli et le drap est humide au milieu du lit, je ne peux pas e´tendre mes jambes parce que je sentirais le mouille´ sous ma peau, quelle ordure, et lui il est tout sec.’’ Ibid., 304. 74. Ibid., 306. 75. ‘‘Le garc¸on de l’hoˆtel rigolait quand nous sommes monte´s, c’est un Alge´rien, je de´teste ces types-la`, j’en ai peur, il m’a regarde´ les jambes, apre`s c¸a il est rentre´ dans le bureau, il a duˆ se dire: ‘C ¸ a y est, ils font c¸a’ et il s’est imagine´ des choses sales.’’ Ibid., 305.

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Index

Aesculapius, 74 Aesop, 39 Amossy, Ruth, 38, 39 Astruc, Alexandre and Michel Contat Sartre par lui-meˆme, 169 Auerbach, Erich Mimesis, 1 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 30,40 Balzac, Honore´ de, 1, 2, 4–5, 58, 66, 87–89, 102, 108, 127, 130, 143, 147, 156, 163–65, 198–99 ‘‘Le chef-d’œuvre inconnu,’’ 44 ‘‘Un cœur simple,’’ 64, 75 La Come´die humaine, 8, 11, 13, 15, 19, 21, 32–33, 35, 37–38, 43–44, 47– 48, 101, 141–42 Le Contrat de mariage, 11, 13–14, 16–30 Le Cousin Pons, 13, 47 La Cousine Bette, 13, 47 E´tudes philosophiques, 44 Euge´nie Grandet, 11, 33, 101 La Fille aux yeux d’or, 14, 23, 41, 47, 54–55 Illusions perdues, 12, 31–32, 47, 54, 64 La Maison Nucingen, 8, 11–12, 14, 16, 18, 30–46 Les Parents pauvres, 11 La Peau de chagrin, 3 Le Pe`re Goriot, 3, 9, 12, 15–16, 23, 32–35, 40, 42–43, 47, 50, 54, 70, 101, 108, 115, 198

La Recherche de l’Absolu, 44, 77 ‘‘Sarrasine,’’ 8–9, 13, 44, 46–57 Sce`nes de la vie parisienne, 11 ‘‘Se´raphıˆta,’’ 47 Splendeurs et mise`res des courtisanes, 12, 31, 47, 54 Sur Catherine de Me´dicis, 2 Ursule Miroue¨t, 39 Bargues-Rollins, Yvonne, 106 Barnes, Julian, 75 Barthes, Roland, 11, 13, 59 S/Z, 8, 46–50, 53, 67, 95 Baudelaire, Charles, 81, 171 Les Fleurs du mal, 66 Beauvoir, Simone de, 148, 169, 192 La Ce´re´monie des adieux, 187 Beckett, Samuel, 87 Comment c’est, 30 L’Innommable, 30 Bell, David, 39, 117 Bellos, David, 111 Belot, Adolphe Mademoiselle Giroud, ma femme, 47 Bernard, Claude, 87–88 Bloom, Harold, 9 Blum, Le´on, 178 Boswell, John, 13 Botticelli, Sandro, 151–52 Bourdieu, Pierre La Distinction, 147 Brillat-Savarin, Jean-Anthelme, 107 La Physiologie du gouˆt, 147 Bronte¨, Emily Wuthering Heights, 30, 80

237

238 Index Brooks, Mel The Producers, 36 Buisine, Alain, 186–87 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 48–49 Cambronne, Pierre, 154 Camus, Albert The Myth of Sisyphus, 62 Careˆme, Antonin, 107 Chambers, Ross, 7 Champfleury, Jules Le Re´alisme, 2 Chaplin, Charlie, 4 Christie, Agatha The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, 6 Cicognara, Leopoldo Storia della scultura dal suo risorgimento in Italia al secolo di Napoleone, 52 Cohn, Dorrit, 7 Colette [Sidonie Gabrielle], 4, 9, 124, 199, 200 Le Ble´ en herbe, 125 Che´ri, 10, 55, 125–41 Claudine a` l’e´cole, 126 La Fin de Che´ri, 125 La Maison de Claudine, 125 La Naissance du jour, 126 Le Pur et l’impur, 136 Comte, Auguste, 87 Culler, Jonathan, 65, 71 Curnonsky, 108 Daguerre, Louis, 3 Deleuze, Gilles, 49, 98 and Felix Guattari: L’Anti-Œdipe, 160 Derrida, Jacques, 5–8, 18, 49, 78, 82, 89, 160 De la grammatologie, 46 Descombes, Vincent, 156 Diderot, Denis, 39 Le Neveu de Rameau, 44 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 30, 87 Doubrovsky, Serge, 183 Dubois, Jacques, 160

Ducrey, Guy, 127 Duranty, Louis Edmond, 2 Le Re´alisme, 2 Eisenstein, Sergei, 4 Eliot, George Middlemarch, 30, 59, 77 Exodus, 186 Faulkner, William The Sound and the Fury, 30 Le Figaro, 156, 159 Flaubert, Gustave, 1, 58, 107, 127, 186, 199 Bouvard et Pe´cuchet, 9, 63–64, 84–87, 100 Dictionnaire des ide´es rec¸ues, 64, 83, 136 L’E´ducation sentimentale, 61–64, 84– 86, 136 Madame Bovary, 2–3, 9, 59, 60–87, 136, 188, 199 Novembre, 61–62 Salammboˆ, 2, 64, 84–86 La Tentation de Saint Antoine, 3, 85 Foucault, Michel, 49 Freud, Sigmund, 75, 98, 126, 130–31, 144, 159, 161, 190 Fynsk, Christopher, 72 Gaillard, Franc¸oise, 60 Galdo´s, Benito Pe´rez La de Bringas, 59 Galen, 74 Gaultier, Jules de, 66, 68, 78 Gautier, The´ophile Mademoiselle de Maupin, 47 Genet, Jean, 170, 186 Genette, Ge´rard, 7, 148 Gide, Andre´, 89, 141, 188, 200 Les Caves du Vatican, 125 Les Faux-monnayeurs, 124 L’Immoraliste, 4, 124 Si le grain ne meurt, 125 Ginsburg, Michal, 85

Index 239 Giotto, 151 Girard, Rene´, 91, 98–99, 149 Girardin, Delphine Gay de, 43 Goncharov, Ivan Oblomov, 30 Goncourt, Edmond de and Jules de Goncourt Manette Salomon, 200 Grimod de la Reynie`re, Alexandre, 107 Guillemin, Henri, 91 Gyges, 43 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 3 Heidegger, Martin, 171 Hill, Lesli, 65 Hippocrates, 74 Hobbes, Thomas, 39 Hugo, Victor ‘‘Boo¨z endormi,’’ 115 Les Mise´rables, 108–9 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 137 Jakobson, Roman, 34 James, Henry, 156 Johnson, Barbara, 47, 50 Joubert, Andre´ J., 128 Joyce, James Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 155 Ulysses, 30 Kafka, Franz, 87 Ein Hungerku¨nstler, 108 Kant, Immanuel, 104 Critique de la raison pure, 44 Keaton, Buster, 4 Kristeva, Julia, 125–26 Kritzman, Lawrence D., 171, 174 La Fontaine, Jean de, 39 La Vallie`re, Mademoiselle de, 79–80 Lacan, Jacques, 68, 126, 130, 148, 156, 160, 199 Leonardo da Vinci

St. John the Baptist, 40 Le´vi-Strauss, Claude, 7 Lloyd, Harold Safety Last!, 4 Louis XIV, 79 Lucey, Michael, 13 Lucretius, 89 Lyotard, Jean-Franc¸ois, 72 Man, Paul de, 19, 89, 160 Mann, Thomas Buddenbrooks, 155 Die Zauberberg, 155, 161 Marie-Antoinette, 109, 121 Marivaux, Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de, 39 Maupassant, Guy de ` vau l’eau, 109 A Bel Ami, 62, 132 Mont-Oriol, 59 Mendel, Gregor, 100 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 191 Les Aventures de la dialectique, 196 Michelangelo, 51 Mirbeau, Octave Le Jardin des supplices, 109 Mitterand, Henri, 111 Molie`re Le Misanthrope, 45 Morel, Auguste, 42 Morris, Edward, 189 Mortimer, Armine Kotin, 1, 31 Writing Realism, 5 Mossman, Carol, 109 The Music Man, 143 Napoleon, 4 Nelson, Brian, 109 Nerval, Ge´rard de ‘‘Ange´lique,’’ 169 Nie´pce, Joseph Nice´phone, 3 Oxford English Dictionary, 51 Palisse, Jacques de la, 70 Parent-Duchaˆtelet, Alexandre, 42

240 Index Petrey, Sandy, 3 Plante´, Francis, 145 Plato, 67, 72 Prendergast, Christopher, 74 Prince, Gerald, 7, 12 Proust, Marcel, 4, 6, 9, 49, 124–25, 141, 165, 198, 200 ` la recherche du temps perdu, 4, 108, A 141, 147, 155–68, 199 Albertine disparue, 157 ‘‘Un Amour de Swann,’’ 10, 141–55, 199 ‘‘Combray,’’ 141–42, 144–47, 152 La Prisonnie`re, 158 Racine, Jean, 112 Phe`dre, 181 Radcliffe, Ann, 48–49 Ricardou, Jean, 65, 89 Richard, Jean-Pierre, 85 Richardson, Samuel, 39 Robert, Marthe, 156 Rogers, Juliette, 126 Rosen, Elisheva, 38–39 Rossini, Gioachino Tancredi, 49–50, 53 Rouff, Marcel, 108 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 7, 15, 67, 72 L’E´mile, 72 Essai sur l’origine des langues, 46 La Nouvelle He´loı¨se, 77 Rubinstein, Anton, 145 Rybalka, Michel, 188 Saint-Pierre, Bernadin de Paul et Virginie, 78–79 Sand, George, 163, 165, 168 Gabriel, 47 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 4, 76, 124, 169, 198, 200 Les Chemins de la liberte´, 170–71, 187 ‘‘E´rostrate,’’ 196 L’Eˆtre et le ne´ant, 170–71, 183–84, 186–91, 193, 196

Huis-clos, 170–71 L’Idiot de la famille, 60, 61, 187 ‘‘Intimite´,’’ 3, 10, 170, 187, 190, 192–97 Les Mots, 72 Le Mur, 10, 170, 171, 187 ‘‘Le Mur,’’ 186–87, 196 La Nause´e, 10, 169–86, 190–91, 196 Saint Genet, 187 Schaeffer, Jean-Marie, 7 Schehr, Lawrence R. Alcibiades at the Door, 170 Schor, Naomi, 32, 78 Segal, Naomi, 89 Se´ginger, Gise`le, 26 Serres, Michel, 89 Le Parasite, 36, 39 Se´vigne´, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de, 112, 163–64 Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Frankenstein, 77 Socrates, 72 Stendhal, 1–2, 4, 41, 58 La Chartreuse de Parme, 3, 58 Le Rouge et le noir, 3, 58 Stewart, James, 35 Taine, Hippolyte, 87 Tre´sor de la langue franc¸aise, 28–29 Unwin, Tim, 61 Verne, Jules Le Chaˆteau des Carpathes, 71 Victoria, Queen of England, 18 Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Auguste L’E`ve future, 77 Voltaire Candide, 45 Willy [Villars, Henri-Gauthier], 200 Le Troisie`me Sexe, 135 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 94

Index 241 Woolf, Virginia To the Lighthouse, 155 The Waves, 155 Zola, Emile, 58, 70, 77, 199–200 L’Assommoir, 91, 99–100, 107–8, 110, 113 Au bonheur des dames, 9, 59, 91, 107, 132

La Beˆte humaine, 58, 88, 91, 107 Le Docteur Pascal, 58–59, 106 Germinal, 3, 9, 58, 88, 91, 98–100, 107, 109–10, 112–23, 147 Nana, 91 Le Roman expe´rimental, 87 Les Rougon-Macquart, 110, 117 Le Ventre de Paris, 9, 87–107 Zuylen, Marina van, 86